FUZZY FINITE-ELEMENT ANALYSIS OF A FOUNDATION ON AN ELASTIC SOIL MEDIUM

One of the important factors that lead to errors in settlement predicitions is the degree of precision in obtaining the soil parameters. Most mathematical methods for reliability modelling offered to date in the area of geomechanics are based on the classical probabilistic approach, in which soil properties are treated as random variables. In this paper, a model based on the theory of fuzzy sets is presented to take account of the uncertainty in the soil behaviour. This proposed method considers the elastic modulus and Poisson's ratio as two fuzzy numbers in the elastic matrix. An example is given to show the possibility distributions of the displacements and the stresses at some locations in the soil medium. By means of a fuzzy inference scheme, the total possibility distributions or total membership functions of the finite element results may be obtained by considering the estimated error resulting from the mesh discretization.