Study on Performance of Footing and Effect of Reinforcement on Manufactured Sand Bed

Most of the urban areas are finding scarcity of land for construction. Even though it is available, few lands possess weak soil strata. Thereby, it becomes very much important to improve the strength of the soil and then to carry the construction activity. There are different ground improvement techniques to stabilize the weak soil, one of the methods is to provide the reinforcement to the foundation bed by replacing the weak soil by sand. Nowadays there is a scarcity of sand, and it is not very easily available in most places, hence it as to be transported from longer distance which is not cost effective, and also illegal mining of sand is causing Environmental issues due to depletion of river sand bed. Hence it is a right time to find alternative to river sand. One of the alternatives is by making use of M-Sand (Manufactured-Sand), which possess similar properties like river sand and its density is comparatively higher than that of river sand. In the present study Experimental work is carried out on square and circular footing resting on unreinforced and reinforced M-Sand bed subjected to static loading condition. The foundation bed is prepared in a mild steel circular tank, The unreinforced and reinforced M-Sand bed is filled in a tank layered wise by raining technique method to achieve its relative density. The parameters varied in the study is relative density, type of footing, number of reinforcement layer. The M-Sand bed is reinforced with multiple layers of geogrid (1, 2, 3, 4, 5). The spacing between the footing and first layer of geogrid is maintained constant as 0.3B (where B is the width of footing) whereas the spacing between the geogrids is also maintained 0.3B. The experimental results demonstrated that M-Sand can be used as the backfill material.