Experimental and Numerical Analysis for Enhancing Bearing Capacity of Shallow Foundation Through Geotextile Implementation

Geosynthetic-reinforced solution is a novel type of soil strengthening technique among other ground improvement techniques because of its cost-effectiveness, environmental advantages, and ease of installation to improve load-bearing characteristics of weak subsoil. This study aims to investigate the improvement potential of using geotextile on a sandy soil bed. Different influencing parameters such as the top layer arrangement, spacing among consecutive layers, number of reinforcing layers, and width of reinforcement have been investigated to examine layout arrangement’s effect on load-settlement characteristics. A steel plate of dimension 70 mm × 70 mm has been chosen to replicate model footing with a thickness of 16 mm. A series of model plate load tests has been incorporated to examine the effects of layout arrangements on soil bed. Further numerical validation has been incorporated using PLAXIS 2D with experimental results. The study’s findings demonstrate that reinforcement configuration has a high potential to improve the load-bearing characteristics of the geotextile-reinforced solution, where experimental results depicted a good agreement with numerical simulations. The configured reinforcement arrangements show an increasing trend of the load-bearing capacity of reinforced fill compared to the unreinforced condition, along with a substantial reduction of footing settlement. The incorporation of geotextiles in this research study is a commendable step toward ensuring environmental sustainability by stabilizing soil.