Influence of Geosynthetic Reinforcement Geometrical Parameters on Load-Bearing Capacity of Sand: An Experimental Study

The aim of this research is to increase the load-carrying capacity of the geotextile-reinforced soils by making a series of modifications to the reinforcement. Laboratory model tests with various types of geosynthetics are evaluated: plane geotextile, grid-geotextiles with a common rib size but having different apertures, grid-geotextiles with varying rib sizes having an optimal aperture, and biaxial geogrid reinforcement layers. Irrespective of aperture and rib sizes, the tensile strength and stiffness of the grid-geotextile reinforcement layers were 2 times lower in comparison to the plane geotextile. In spite, the plate load test results revealed that the sand bed reinforced with low tensile strength and stiffness of grid-geotextile showed 1.15 times improvement as settlement ratio enhanced in comparison to sand bed reinforced with high tensile strength and stiffness of plane geotextile. This improvement is attributed to the interface and interlocking mechanism of the grid-geotextile reinforcement layers. The test results of grid-geotextile and biaxial geogrid-reinforced sand beds are compared. Also, this paper highlighted the influence parameters of geogrid reinforcements and accentuated their optimum ranges to the acquisition of maximum reinforcement benefits. Simple correlations were developed and presented along with the limits for the determination of the bearing capacity ratio of geogrid-reinforced sand beds with the influencing factors.