Abstract
Nowadays, some projects have to be constructed in areas having thick layers of soft clay. These soft soils with low shear strength and high voids ratio, lead to excessive settlements even if subjected to low vertical or lateral loads. For this reason, soft clays are considered problematic soils for foundation purposes. Several improvement techniques have been done to enhance such clay. Stone columns have been used to improve soft soils by increasing it carrying capacity and reducing the settlement. In this paper, a numerical study on seismic behavior of stone column in soft clay subjected to earthquake loading has been performed. A two-dimensional plane strain program PLAXIS (dynamic version) is used for the present numerical modeling. A series of modeled stone columns were simulated with different diameters and spacing between columns. Also, the influence of geotextile encasement on the performance of stone columns, foundation systems in soft clay is investigated and compared with the behavior of ordinary stone columns without casing. The results showed that the ordinary stone column with small spacing and larger diameter has a greater bearing capacity and give a smaller settlement, compared to the column with large spacing. In addition, the geotextile encasement for stone column can be provided a significant increase in stone column capacity as well as a huge reduction in settlement is considered with increasing the encasement strength.
Highlights
Stone column technique is considered to be one of the finest soil improvement techniques and it's been used wide over the last thirty years in several countries round the world as a ground improvement methodology (Black et al 2007)
Et al and Vikunj (2017), studied numerically the behavior of 2 differing types of stone columns sheathed and un-encased column at completely different traditional pressure, the result of column diameter in 2 cases is taken into account, they found that by increasing the traditional pressure and diameter of stone column the shear strength of soil increased based on the theory of increasing the densification of the stone column leads to increase of modulus of elasticity and the more larger diameter the more densification occur
The adopted finite element program Plaxis was validated by analyzing the load settlement behavior of stone columns in a model test that was investigated by Ambily and Gandhi (2007)
Summary
Stone column technique is considered to be one of the finest soil improvement techniques and it's been used wide over the last thirty years in several countries round the world as a ground improvement methodology (Black et al 2007). Mohanty (2017), studied seismic behavior of sloping bedded soil with and while not stone column, they over that in earthquake loading, the pore water pressure within the soil deposit gets raised and the presence of stone column helps in dissipating the developed pore water pressure It acts as a reinforcing material in soil deposits. PLAXIS software system has been used for this study, from results they found that load carrying capability and bulging behavior of geosynthetic sheathed stone column was considerably influenced by the depth and stiffness of enclosure. Constant studies and analyses square measure dispensed to research the consequences of parameters like stiffness and length of the geosynthetics as modulus of physical property of the column’s material on the mechanical behavior of the cluster of GEC’s.
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