ABSTRACT
A variety of design methods have been proposed to estimate the settlement of footings in sand using cone penetration test (CPT) results. Yet, due to the limited number of well-documented, high-quality footing load tests, efforts still need to be made to assess the performance of these methods. This paper presents two case histories of full-scale, instrumented load tests performed on axially loaded, square footings in silica sand reported in the literature. The performance of the traditional Schmertmann method and more modern CPT-based methods are evaluated through a detailed comparison between the predicted footing load-settlement curves and those obtained from footing load test measurements. For the case histories considered, these modern methods are shown to generally produce more accurate, reliable, and consistent predictions of footing response in sand than the traditional Schmertmann method.
