Effect of Coir Reinforced Soil on the Seismic Response of RC Framed Buildings

This study examines the effectiveness of reinforcing the soil with coir mat, a natural material, to act as a seismic soil-isolation medium. A 3D finite element simulation has been carried out on models of five-storey buildings resting on raft foundations in soft and stiff soil with and without the soil-isolation mechanism. The optimum values of the parameters such as the depth of embedment, width, and thickness of the coir mat have been analyzed. The isolated soil-structure system was exposed to two different earthquake motions, such as El Centro (1940) and simulated seismic excitation corresponds to the elastic design spectrum for Zone III as per the Indian Standard code (IS 1893 (Part 1): 2016). The optimum value for the depth of embedment, width, and thickness of the coir mat was identified as B/18, B/0.45 and B/36. The proposed study also deals with the coir (C) mat composited with other isolation materials such as polyethylene (PE) foam, rubber (RU) mat and geomembrane (G) to form C-PE, C-RU and C-G mats. These composites were proposed to increase the durability of the coir mat. The reinforcement of the C-PE mat shows a maximum of about 30% reduction in roof acceleration and 68% reduction in contact pressure. A pore water pressure analysis of soil bed also has been carried out to study the efficacy of these materials to reduce the excess pore water pressure generated in soil under earthquake loading. For that, a simple soft soil is modelled in Cyclic 1D software with and without the soil-isolation mechanism. The soil bed was exposed to El Centro (1940) and Northridge (1994) input motions. C-PE mat significantly reduces the excess pore water pressure by almost 93% and 88% in soil under El Centro and Northridge input motions, respectively.