Physical Modelling Of Improving Bearing Capacity For Foundations By Geo Fabrics

Abstract

The objective of the research paper is to develop a new model by which we can improve the bearing capacity of foundation by using geo fabrics. The primary design concerns for a foundation engineer are bearing capacity and settlement. The soil reinforcement technique of the geo synthetic has been taken into account for developing such a model that can be used to reduce excessive settlements on soft soils and prevent the foundation from failing. Hence, this paper summarizes the physical and numerical simulation to verify the results to enhance the performance of the foundation. Motivation: With the rapid increase in globalization, there has been a shortage of land. Deep foundations are required for poor soil conditions, sloping lands and where there is problems regarding site drainage. Besides with rising cost of materials and increased labor and time required for construction, it has become the need of the hour to develop a new model that will do away with the traditional materials, increase the bearing capacity, and reduce settlement to construct the foundations. The geo synthetics are the third revolution in civil engineering materials that has taken the world by surprise. Its increasing usage owing to its non biodegradable ness, durability, increasing the factor of safety and cost effectiveness can be used to develop a model that would increase the bearing capacity of foundations. Besides, in places where deep foundations are used for poor soil conditions and drainage problems, we can use this new cost effective model of shallow foundation with geofabrics that results in increased bearing capacity. I. Introduction: The primary design criteria for a foundation are bearing capacity and settlement. The use of geo synthetic material to improve the bearing capacity and the settlement performance of a shallow foundation has been of much interest to geotechnical engineers. Several research works has been carried out for soil improvement using several geosynthetic materials. Binquet and Lee used metallic strip under strip footing to improve its bearing capacity. Geogrids and geo cells were later on used for such work. From the finding of numerous researchers, it can be concluded that the bearing capacity of soil also changed with various factors like type of reinforcing materials, number of reinforcement layers, ratios of different parameters of reinforcing materials, and foundations such as footing width, location of the 1st layer of reinforcement to width of footing and vertical spacing between consecutive geogrid layer. However, not much appreciable work has been done with geofabrics to improve the bearing capacity of foundations. The ratio of improvement in the bearing capacity can be expressed in a non dimensional form as bearing capacity ratio (BCR) which is the ratio of bearing capacity of reinforced soil to bearing capacity of unreinforced soil. The present study investigates the improvement of bearing capacity of shallow foundations with the utilization of geofabrics. OBJECTIVE: 1. To improve the bearing capacity of foundations with the help of geo fabric 2. To determine the place where the geo fabric should be placed. 3. To determine the reason behind the increase in bearing capacity. 4. To validate the results using physical simulation.