Scale effect on the behavior of geocell-reinforced soil

Abstract

Existing studies confirmed that the response of geocell-reinforced beds is directly affected by contributory factors, including soil's grains, geocell's characteristics, and surface loading geometries. In this paper, a series of plate load tests has been carried out for the further understanding of the behaviour of geocell-reinforced soil. Four different soil grains sizes, two different geocell's opening sizes and three different loading plate sizes were the considered variables. During the tests, the applied loading and soil surface settlements were recorded to evaluate the systems' response. As it was expected, the geocell-reinforced soil exhibited higher bearing capacity than the unreinforced status, up to 524%. The results further focused on the important role of scale effect on the response of reinforced foundations. The optimum nominal cells size of geocells was obtained about 15 times of medium grain size of soil. Also, it was found that in order to obtain the highest reinforcement benefits, the footing's width should be in the range 13–27 (20 in average) times of medium grain size of the backfill. Finally, to provide more stable and reliable geocell-reinforced backfill, it is recommended that the cells size of geocells should be selected smaller than 0.67 times of footing width.