Laboratory and numerical study of the behavior of circular footing resting on sandy soils contaminated with oil under cyclic loading

This research studies the behavior of circular foundations resting on the soils contaminated with gas oil and kerosene oil under cyclic loading. The final objective of this study is to determine the impact level of the foundation of the reservoirs resting on oil-contaminated sand due to their llifing and discharging. The contaminated sand layers were mixed with different percentages of contamination from 2% to 6% of kerosene oil and gasoline. The effect of the contamination percentage, the value of the applied load, and the depth and type of contamination were investigated in this study. To validate the numerical studies performed by finite element software, small-scale laboratory tests were carried out. The results showed that the pollutants could affect the amount of final settlement and the number of loading cycles required to achieve this value. An increase in depth, the number of load cycles, and the contaminated content led to an increase in the final settlement. In addition, the number of loading cycles to reach that level increased. Numerical results showed acceptable compatibility in the load-settlement charts with the experimental results.