Geocell-Reinforced Foundation Systems: A Critical Review

The ever increasing infrastructure development requires adequate and competent ground, which is becoming scarce at present. Thus, developing techniques for improving the weak soil (having low bearing capacity and/or likely to undergo excessive settlement) into a competent acceptable condition is a major task for geotechnical engineering practice. In this perspective, the concept of ‘reinforcing the soil’ is being widely appreciated and extensively practiced. For last few decades, the soil-reinforcement in various forms, such as planar and/or three-dimensional, has been vividly applied in several fields of civil engineering. As compared to the planar form, the three-dimensional ‘Geocell’ is comparatively new invention in soil-reinforcement. It is a honeycombing interconnected cellular confinement system, made of geosynthetics, such as geotextiles and/or geogrids. It has been observed that ‘Geocells’ significantly enhances the load-bearing capacity of soils and reduces settlement of the concern geotechnical structure. Apart from load-bearing (especially in pavements and foundations), it has also been extensively used in various slope stabilization, embankment construction and railway track applications. With increasing trend and demand, the performance of geocell-reinforcement has rigorously been studied for its betterment and optimum parametric configurations. Studies have revealed a large numbers of parameters, such as reinforcement geometry, interaction with filled soil, etc., largely influencing the performance of geocell-reinforced systems. In view of that, this paper aims to present a critical review of the parametric behavior of geocell-reinforced systems which would be a very useful document for various applications and further research.