Abstract: Thin-walled spread foundations are used in coastal projects where the soil strength is relatively low. Developing a predictive model of bearing capacity for this kind of foundation is of interest due to the fact that the famous bearing capacity equations are proposed for conventional footings. Many studies underlined the applicability of artificial neural networks (ANNs) in predicting the bearing capacity of foundations. However, the majority of these models are built using conventional ANNs, which suffer from slow rate of learning as well as getting trapped in local minima. Moreover, they are mainly developed for conventional footings. The prime objective of this study is to propose an improved ANN-based predictive model of bearing capacity for thin-walled shallow foundations. In this regard, a relatively large dataset comprising 145 recorded cases of related footing load tests was compiled from the literature. The dataset includes bearing capacity (Q_u), friction angle, unit weight of sand, footing width, and thin-wall length to footing width ratio (L_w/B). Apart from Q_u, other parameters were set as model inputs. To enhance the diversity of the data, four more related laboratory footing load tests were conducted on the Johor Bahru sand, and results were added to the dataset. Experimental findings suggest an almost 0.5 times increase in the bearing capacity in loose and dense sands when L_w/B is increased from 0.5 to 1.12. Overall, findings show the feasibility of the ANN-based predictive model improved with particle swarm optimization (PSO). The correlation coefficient was 0.98 for testing data, suggesting that the model serves as a reliable tool in predicting the bearing capacity.

Key words: Thin-walled foundation, Sand, Bearing capacity, Artificial neural network (ANN), Particle swarm optimization (PSO)

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