Laboratory Testing of Enhancing the Bearing Capacity of Strip Footing with Woven Geotextiles

Laboratory sand box tests were performed in this study to investigate the improvement in bearing capacity of a strip footing reinforced with woven geotextile in dry sand. The test cell is 0.9m wide, 0.9m long and 1.0m high. A hydraulic loading system was used to apply the normal force to a 0.85m × 0.1m × 0.05m (length × width × height) strip footing. The unreinforced bearing capacity was obtained and compared with value calculated using Terzaghi’s equation. Various parameters such as: burial depth, length of reinforcement, number of layers and distance between layers were varied to investigate their effects on the bearing capacity. Results of these tests indicate that the optimum burial depth of reinforcement is about 0.4 times the width of footing, with a bearing capacity ratio (BCR) of about 1.67. The optimum reinforcement length is about 3~4 times the width of footing with a BCR value of 1.81. The improvements in bearing capacity obtained from laboratory testing are in accord with previous numerical simulation. However, the loading behaviors are quite different due to the failure mechanism assumed in the numerical simulation.