HBRP Publication Page 1-11 2021. All Rights Reserved Page 1 Journal of Advances in Geotechnical Engineering Volume 4 Issue 2 Bearing Capacity of Isolated Square Skirted Foundation on Cohesionless Soil: An Experimental and Analytical Study Samir Parmar 1* , R.M. Patel 2 1 Assistant Professor, DDU, Nadiad, Gujarat, India. 2 Retd. Professor, L.D.Engg. Collage, Ahmedabad, India. *Email id: samirddu@gmail.com ABSTRACT Skirted foundations are being used increasingly for foundations of offshore structures, the popular name of that foundations is bucket foundations. The provision of skirts on the periphery of shallow foundation will result in increasing confinement of soil and hence improvement in state of stress as well as soil structure interaction. The present paper describes study of model square skirted foundation for axial loads in cohesionless soils. The parameters like aspect ratio of skirt (skirt length), skirt angle α, depth of placement of foundation are considered in experiments and compared with model plane footing without skirts. Bearing capacity of the model foundations were carried out by stress controlled plate load test. Results shows considerable increase in bearing capacity because of provision of skirts, hence skirted foundations is suitable for on shore structures also. The governing mechanism for the behaviour of skirted foundations is explained. Keywords:-Skirted foundations, mechanism of skirted footing, confinement effect, model plate load test INTRODUCTION Footings are used to transfer the loads and moments from the columns to the soil. It is necessary to ensure that while performing this job neither soil should fail nor the footing. Another aspect of preventing failure of the soil-footing system is to improve interaction between the soil and the footing structure. To increase the interaction between soil foundation system researchers provided different geometrical profile to the base of the foundation. Some of them are Hyperbolic paraboloid shell foundation, conical shell foundation for isolated footings and Inverted Spherical dome raft, inverted Dom cum raft, Folded cone ring raft etc. for the circular structures as shallow foundations. LITERATURE REVIEW Kurian and Varghese (1969) introduced the idea of hyperbolic shell as a column foundation. Individual Square footing of this type were investigated theoretically as well as experimentally for vertical load. Rao and Narhari (1979) developed a skirted plug and ring foundations where the skirts are not built in with footing but located at further distance. Alam Singh, Ohri and Moorthy (1982) used a skirted footing in which skirtes are bolted to the RCC footing, whereas Kurian (1982) and Alam singh and Chaudhary (1987) used skirts as built in component with the parent footing and noted considerable improvement in bearing capacity. Adel Hunna and El-Rehman (1990) investigated triangular shell strip foundation experimentally and theoretically. Borthakur (1992) used RCC skirts for ring foundations as a ground improvement technique. Al Aghbari and Mohmaedzein (2004) investigated skirted strip footing for the skirt roughness factor, skirt depth ratio as well as foundation base friction. Shah and Shroff (1991) studied skirted strip footing experimentally and