Bearing capacity of square footing on geocell reinforced fly ash beds

The paper presents advantages of geocell reinforcement on the behavior of fly ash beds as foundation media through a series of laboratory model tests and suggests a simple design method for footing supported on geocell reinforced fly ash beds. Model square footings were tested on fly ash beds prepared in a steel test tank without geocell layer and with geocell layer. A Series of uniform static loads were applied on top of steel model footing and load-deformation behavior of reinforced fly ash beds and strains in the membrane of the geocell was observed throughout during the tests until failure. The influence of various parameters of the footing supported on geocell reinforced fly ash beds namely height and length of geocell, cell size of the geocell, tensile stiffness of geocell material and type of fill material were studied. The test results showed that the geocell-reinforced fly ash beds had undergone much smaller permanent deformations than the unreinforced fly ash beds resulting in 3 to 4 times improvement in bearing capacity than the unreinforced fly ash beds. (C) 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.