Interaction of a rigid beam resting on a strong granular layer overlying weak granular soil: Multi-Methodological Investigations

•Layered soil materials are characterised using different techniques.•Failure patterns of layered soil systems are analysed using DPIV.•A correlation between the slip surface angle β and H/B is presented.•A good level of comparisons between the DPIV and FEM results.•A new methodology is proposed to estimate UBC of layered soil.