Lack of enough bearing capacity is often a problem in shallow foundation over saturated clay.The common solutions are pile foundation or soil improvement which will cause unnecessary cost.Looking for a shallow foundation with higher bearing capacity will be an alternative solution for this conflict.Inspired by the skirt foundation in the abroad offshore platform

a new type of skirt strip foundation was put forward in the paper.This foundation can obviously increase the ultimate bearing capacity of the ground by restricting the shear slide of the underlying soil through vertical skirts.The numerical model of skirt strip foundation over undrained clay was built first.Then the bearing capacity and failure mode of the skirted foundation and the embedded foundation were compared.Analysis showed that the bearing capacity of skirt foundation was identical to that the embedded foundation of the same height.The skirt foundation had the advantages of convenient operation and material saving.The computing equation of bearing capacity was derived by theoretical analysis and the precision of the presented equation was verified by comparison.