EVALUATION OF BEARING CAPACITY INCREASE FOR WOVEN GEOTEXTILE REINFORCED SOILS IN TERMS OF WIDTH OF FOOTING

If it is understood that a soil medium cannot safely support the planned structure from the point of bearing capacity and settlement, various options can be applied in geotechnical engineering. These are relocation of the structure, usage of deep foundation, stabilisation of the soil, substitution of weak soil with well-graded coarse-grained soil by compaction, usage of geosynthetics, etc. These alternatives are evaluated according to the cost and availability of necessary materials and equipment. Geotextiles, one of the geosynthetic products, have been widely used for soil reinforcement recently. Therefore, the study intends to specify the soil's bearing capacity increase with geotextile and its dependence on footing width. For this aim, a testing apparatus has been produced, and the experiments have been conducted with a strip footing model on soil with various relative densities. Besides, this test setup was simulated with PLAXIS 2D software depending on the finite element method (FEM), and numerical analyses were performed. The numerical results were compared with the laboratory tests to verify parameters of M-C material model. Consequently, the study stated that the relative density of the sand, footing width, and reinforcement layer are significant factors for the bearing capacity increase of granular soils.