Professor, Department of Civil Engineering, University of Bahrain, Kingdom of Bahrain

Dr. Mustafa Aytekin is a full professor at the Civil Engineering Department of University of Bahrain, UOB, Kingdom of Bahrain. He earned his PhD in geotechnical engineering at Texas Tech University (TTU), Texas, USA in 1992. Then, he moved his home country, Turkey and worked as an assistant professor at Karadeniz Technical University. KTU. He became an associate professor in 1995. Then, he moved the New York City, USA and worked at Manhattan College in NYC. He returned to Turkey and became a full professor in 2001. He served as chairman of civil engineering department till 2004. Then, he was assigned as the dean of the College of Engineering and Architecture. He also worked as a consultant of the President of KTU. In 2009, he moved to Kingdom of Bahrain as a full professor to teach Geotechnical and Structural courses. He is the chairman of Civil Engineering Department at UOB since 2016. His speciality is in geotechnical engineering, and works on the problematic soils such as expansive soils, collapsible soils, and numerical modelling of their engineering behaviour. He has more than a hundred published journal papers and conference papers. He is an editorial board member of several journals regarding geotechnical engineering. He serves as referee of several SCI-E journals such as Geotextiles and Geomembranes, Arabian Journal of Science and Engineering.

Speech Title: The latest developments on the estimation of bearing capacity and settlement of shallow foundations

Abstract: Bearing capacity and settlement requirements are two basic criteria that must be satisfied in the design of any type of foundations. The criterion on bearing capacity ensures that the foundations do not undergo shear failure (bearing failure) under the applied load, while settlement criterion ensures that settlement of superstructure is within the tolerable settlement requirements. Any type of foundation must carry and transfer the load safely from superstructure to the soil or rock around it. There must be no shear failure with an acceptable settlement (allowable settlement, tolerable settlement). Therefore, the maximum bearing pressure of foundations would be affected by considering the shear failure and tolerable settlement so that a bearing capacity of soil that would satisfy both conditions is called as the allowable bearing capacity of the foundation〖(q〗_(a)). In order to estimate the allowable bearing capacity and corresponding settlements, many methods have been proposed. These methods use data either from field tests and observations, or based on the theory of elasticity.

In this study, a brief summary on the development of the estimation of bearing pressure and corresponding settlements on granular soils is given. Several experimental works in which settlements of shallow foundations have been measured are summarized. Then, using the settlement values calculated by the estimation methods, and the measured values of settlements from the field and lab experiments are compared. Most of the methods to estimate the settlements under bearing pressures overestimate the settlement and under estimate allowable bearing capacity. Therefore, shallow foundations are designed conservatively. In general, the difference among the methods is the degree of the conservativeness.