Applications of geocells in cohesionless soil an experimental study

The paper discusses the improvement in bearing capacity of square footing placed at cohesionless soil reinforced with Geocell. Mohr – Coulomb failure criterion was used in the observations. To study effects of geocells with respect to planar geogrid, tests were conducted on planar reinforcement also. Numerical analysis results obtained by PLAXIS have been compared with those obtained from experiments and were found to be in good agreement. A parametric study revealed the role of length of reinforcement, spacing between layers, placement of reinforcement from top surface etc. on bearing capacity. A design example has been given to illustrate the savings in cost of construction of footing on reinforced sand. The study shows that improvement in bearing capacity with respect to unreinforced soil is of the order of 86% and settlement reduction is 13.07% for single layer of geocells which for double layers of geocells is 693% and 86.48% respectively. The cost reduction is 23.5% with respect to unreinforced soil.