Numerical Modeling of Recycled Plastic Pin Reinforced Embankment over Soft Soils

Abstract

Construction of embankment over soft foundation soils is incredibly a challenging task due to the risk of bearing failure and excessive settlement of foundation soil. Most of the available conventional methods for addressing these problems are either expensive or time-consuming or both. Therefore, research has been striving to develop a sustainable alternative to the current conventional methods. A noble approach to improve the problematic foundation soil could be the use of recycled plastic pins (RPP) in combination with geosynthetics. This study is focused on evaluating the effectiveness of RPP in improving the bearing capacity of unsuitable foundation soil using finite element analysis. The numerical investigation was conducted using finite element software PLAXIS 2D. An extensive parametric study was performed to evaluate the effect of RPP size and spacing. The parametric study indicated that the vertical deformation decreases with larger RPP size and closer RPP spacing. Furthermore, for both reinforced and unreinforced sections, settlement increased with an increase in the surcharge load; however, at all loading stages, the reinforced section was found to be performing significantly better compared to the unreinforced section. Effectiveness of different types of load transfer platform was also studied. It was found that aggregate layers sandwiched between geogrid layers was effective in reducing settlement and transferring embankment load to RPPs.