NUMERICAL STUDY ON BEHAVIOUR OF ENCASED GRANULAR PILE IN STRATIFIED SOIL

Abstract

The lack of higher-quality construction sites for buildings, roads, and transportation infrastructure is driving the rapid rise in importance of ground improvement approaches. Compaction and low bearing capacity are characteristics of problematic soils, which include soft clay, peat, coastal clay, and recent fills. These soils can be dangerous for structures built on them. Before development begins on such locations, corrective action must be taken. Although there are many different ground improvement methods available, the most practical, cost-effective, and efficient one is the granular pile method. For many different types of soil, granular pile, also known as stone columns, is an affordable and efficient way to enhance the land. Granular pile performance varies according to load, geometry, and spacing pattern; this can result in failure of the pile as a whole or in individual pieces. Shear, bulging, and punching are the many failure modes; bulging failure is the most common. In order to comprehend the load-settlement behavior of encased granular piles in stratified soil made up of soft clay and sand, finite element studies were carried out in the current work utilizing the commercially available program PLAXIS 2D. The granular pile, sand, and soft clay are all modeled using the elastic-perfectly plastic response (Mohr-Coulomb criterion). Parametric study is carried out by varying the properties of clay and granular pile to understand the effects of various parameter such as encasement stiffness, diameter, friction angle, shear strength of soil, thickness of the soil layer have been studied in this analyses. The present study includes (a) the Load-settlement behaviors of EGPs in stratified soil. and (b) the load-carrying capacity of granular in stratified soil under entire area loading..