PERFORMANCE ANALYSIS OF GEOSYNTHETIC REINFORCED PILED EMBANKMENTS

Construction of infrastructure facilities in coastal areas is quite challenging due to the problems posed by the low bearing capacity and high compressibility of the foundation soils in those areas. Several researches have shown that Geosynthetic Reinforced Piled Embankment Systems (GRPES) is an attractive solution for such problems. In this paper, finite element based 2-dimensional axisymmetric analyses has been carried out to study the interactions between friction pile-soil-geosynthetics considering different factors. The calculations are performed in drained conditions, simulating the long-term behaviour of the GRPES. The validity of the axisymmetric unit cell model was tested by comparing the results obtained in this work with a full 3Dimensional model and measured field data available in the literature. The paper discusses the model details and the various results obtained with friction piles of different length. Based on the numerical simulations it was observed that GRPES caused significant load transfer from the soil to the piles due to soil arching.