Bearing capacity and settlement of strip footing on geosynthetic reinforced clayey slopes

Abstract

The effect of geosynthetic reinforcing on bearing capacity of a strip footing resting on georeinforced clayey slopes was investigated. The results of a series of numerical study using finite element analyses on strip footing upon both reinforced and unreinforced clayey slopes were presented. The objectives of this work are to: 1) determine the influence of reinforcement on the bearing-capacity of the strip footings adjacent slopes, 2) suggest an optimum number of reinforcement and 3) survey the effect of friction angle in clayey soils reinforced by geogrids. The investigations were carried out by varying the edge distance of the footing from slope. Also different numbers of geosynthetic layers were applied to obtaining the maximum bearing capacity and minimum settlement. To achieve the third objective, two different friction angles were used. The results show that the load-settlement behavior and ultimate bearing capacity of footing can be considerably improved by the inclusion of reinforcing layer. But using more than one layer reinforcement, the ultimate bearing capacity does not change considerably. It is also shown that for both reinforced and unreinforced slopes, the bearing capacity increases with an increase in edge distance. In addition, as the soil friction angle is increased, the efficiency of reinforcing reduces.