Settlement in Geosynthetic Reinforced Square Footing Over Plastic Soil

Construction over Plastic soil can cause adverse effects on the performance of the earth structures, due to the low load carrying capacities of such soils. Many civil engineering structures like Buildings, Major and Minor bridges, Under passes, and Flyovers collapse and undergo crack formation in areas where Plastic soil with poor load carrying capacity is present. Geosynthetic reinforcements have successfully been used in recent times as a low cost method for reinforcing such soils to improve their stability and bearing capacity. However, to recover significant benefit from the geosynthetics, the materials need to be placed at optimum locations within the foundation. Hence, in this paper, small scale laboratory footing tests have been performed to study the effect of depth of the first layer of reinforcement (u), number of reinforcement layers (N), width of reinforcement (b), and the vertical spacing between reinforcements (h). The results obtained demonstrated that the placement and the loading condition of the geosynthetics greatly influences the bearing capacity of the foundation. The results obtained from the experimental analysis were used for the computation of a regression model in R Studio, for the determining the load carrying capacity of reinforced soil foundation. The model presented obtained a confidence level of more than 95%, when parameters significant for the computation of load carrying capacity of square footing were included, thus showing great convergence with the experimental results.