Bearing Capacity of a Model Square Footing on Geocomposite Reinforced Layered Soil

The efforts made all over the world towards the fact of decreasing the environmental pollution have been enormously demanding now a days. Therefore the increase in caution towards a sustainable environment has restricted the use of materials which may have huge impact towards environment pollution. The geosynthetic is a cost-effective and corrosive resistant material which can be used in the most exposed conditions to mitigate the anticipated excessive settlement in case of soft soil. The present study investigated the behaviour of a geocomposite material in a layered soil system. Three types of geocomposite were manufactured by changing the tensile stiffness of the components viz. GCBX-40, GC-BX-60, and GC-BX80. The basic configuration of every geocomposite was same and was made by sandwiching a geotextile layer in between the two geogrid layers which have significantly improved the surface frictional resistance due to the increase in the surface cover ratio and also the improvement in the interlocking effect on the soil grains due to the geogrid layers on both sides. The various layouts of geocomposite were introduced in this study besides the general planar layout and it was found that the confinement effect was increased with in the soil layers. Therefore, the cohesion (c) between the soil grains and the frictional angle (& phi;) was modified due the increased confinement which not only improved the bearing capacity factor but the settlement reductions factor was also improved. The results revealed that the load carrying capacity was improved from 33.8 to 40.59% by using different types of geocomposite.