Behaviour of sand confined with single and multiple geocells

This paper studies the influence of geocell confinement on the strength and stiffness behaviour of granular soils. A large number of triaxial compression tests were performed on granular soil encased in single and multiple geocells. The geocells were fabricated by hand using different woven and nonwoven geotextiles and soft mesh to investigate the effect of the stiffness of the geocell on the overall performance of geocell-soil composite. In general, it was observed that the granular soil develops a large amount of apparent cohesive strength due to the confinement by the geocell. The magnitude of this cohesive strength was observed to be dependent on the properties of the geosynthetic used to fabricate the geocell. The stiffness of the composite was also found to increase with the provision of geocell reinforcement. The results have shown that using three interconnected cells in the testing programme is adequate to simulate the performance of geocell reinforcement layer consisting of many interconnected cells. A simple methodology has been presented in the paper to estimate the magnitude of the apparent cohesive strength developed by the granular soil as a function of the geometric and material properties of the geocell.