الفهرس | Only 14 pages are availabe for public view |
Abstract Due to the over-increasing demand for land space of increased construction activity worldwide, there is increasing needs to improve soft soil grounds which otherwise are unsuitable for adopting the conventional shallow foundations. Using deep foundations, such as piles, to by-pass the weak soil is often costly. Ground improvement technique is a potential alternative to mitigate this problem. Amongst the various ground improvement techniques used for improving the in-situ ground conditions, geosynthetics reinforcement and stone column technique are probably the most versatile ones. This is primarily due to their simplicity, ease of construction and overall economy that finds favor with the practicing engineers. Stone columns and geosynthetic reinforced sand beds are effective methods to improve foundation performance on soft clay soil. Although their individual applications have been extensively studied, the combined application of both has remained unexplored. The current thesis presents a series of numerical model tests which run to simulate the construction of footing rests on soft clay without any improvements (Case 1: soft clay only), then it was run with single or group of ordinary stone columns, without encasement, (Case 2: OSC) and with single or group of encased stone columns only (Case 3: ESC) installed in soft clay soil. Also, the model was run with an unreinforced sand bed only (Case 4: USB) or with geosynthetic reinforced sand bed (Case 5: GRSB). Finally, the model was run with the combined application of unreinforced sand bed placed over single or group of encased stone columns |