Reinforcement of floating stone columns with spaced reinforcing rings

Abstract

The major failure mode of long floating stone columns (FSCs) is lateral bulging. Geosynthetic encasement may be a solution to provide additional confinement to stone column materials and reduce their lateral bulging. However, encasing FSCs may lead to a punching failure mode with no significant additional bearing capacity achieved. In this paper, a new reinforcing method is proposed for increased enhancement of the load–settlement behaviour of FSCs. In this method, a set of ring-type reinforcement is used around the periphery of the FSC, called spaced reinforcing rings (SRRs) method. These rings are located along the whole or a part of the FSC length at specified spacing intervals. Laboratory experiments and numerical analyses were performed to investigate the proposed method and contributing parameters on the performance of SRR-reinforced FSCs (SRR-FSCs). The results showed that the use of SRRs is more beneficial than full or partial encasement of FSCs in most situations. This finding, together with the use of lower amounts of reinforcement materials may be of practical interest. In addition, the best configuration for such discrete reinforcement and guidelines for practice are presented.