ABSTRACT
There are many problems in the field of geomechanics, where the soil profile may be idealised as consisting of horizontal layers for which the geometry and material properties do not vary in one or two spatial directions. In order to convey the general concepts of the method, people consider a problem that is common in geomechanics, that of a strip loading applied to the surface of a layered soil. The finite layer techniques may be used for problems involving consolidation of horizontally layered soil deposits. A function such as the loading function, may be represented by a Fourier series, where the addition of various periodic sine or cosine functions are added together to approximate the original function. If Fourier transforms are applied to the field variables instead of using Fourier series to represent them, two-and three-dimensional problems may again reduced to ones involving only a single spatial dimension.
