STUDY OF IMPROVEMENT IN SOIL BEHAVIOUR BY USING GEOGRID AND GEOFABRIC

Abstract

The concept of reinforced soil has become extensively popular world over The soil generally used in reinforced soil structures is granular soil. Cohesive soils have been held- unsuitable because of problems of short term stability and possibility of post construction movements. However, significant economic benefits would result if locally available cohesive soil could be used for reinforced soil construction. The pi-esent study has been conducted to investigate . the strength and deformation characteristics of reinforced earth. For this, a series of triaxial tests were carried out on Solani sand and Kaolin clay reinforced with geogrid and geotextile. Drained tests were carried out on reinforced Solani sand and undrained tests were carried out on reinforced Kaolin clay under different confining pressures with different number of layers of reinforcement. The study covered the aspects of failure pattern, shear strength parameters, peak deviator stress and percentage strain at failure. The results of drained test on reinforced Solani sand exhibit 'appreciable increase in the value of 'C' as well as 4', indicating increase in overall value of shear strength, whereas improvement in strength during undrained testing of Kaolin clay is not very significant. Strength increases only slightly with increase in number of layers of reinforcement.