Centrifuge study on the lateral loaded response of the monopod and tripod bucket foundations in sand

Abstract

In this paper, a series of centrifuge tests were carried out in medium dense sand to investigate and compare the lateral loaded behaviour of a monopod and a tripod, which were fabricated with an identical amount of material. The experimental results shows that tripod bucket foundation exhibited better load resistance capacity with higher initial stiffness than the monopod. The drained cyclic capacity of a bucket foundation in dry sand is higher than the corresponding monotonic test. The increase of bearing capacity for the tripod is much more pronounced. While subjected to lateral cycling, the rotation of the monopod increases with number of cycles but at a decreasing rate, which follows a power function. Differing from the monopod, the rotation of the tripod increases during the first few hundreds of cycling but turned to a decrease thereafter. The resulted cumulative residual rotation of the tripod was therefore almost zero. This unique feature of “self-healing” in cumulative rotation of the tripod make it superior to the monopod.