For cases involving earthquake-induced liquefaction failures or punching shear failures, the depth of soil involvement could exceed the footing width. For buildings with numerous spread footings that occupy a large portion of the building area, the individual pressure bulbs from each footing may combine and thus the entire width of the building could be involved in a bearing capacity failure.
Either a total stress analysis or an effective stress analysis must be used in order to determine the bearing capacity of a foundation. Table 4.9 presents a summary of the type of analyses and the shear strength parameters that should be used for the bearing capacity calculations.
Figure 6.21 illustrates the earthquake-induced punching shear analysis. The soil layer portrayed by dashed lines represents unliquefiable soil that is underlain by a liquefied soil layer. For the punching shear analysis, it is assumed that the load will cause the foundation to punch straight downward through the upper unliquefiable soil layer and into the liquefied soil layer. As shown in Fig. 6.21, this assumption means that there will be vertical shear surfaces in the soil that start at the sides of the footing and extend straight downward to the liquefied soil layer.
It is also assumed that the liquefied soil has no shear strength.
Using the assumptions outlined above, the factor of safety F can be calculated as follows:
For strip footings: