The behavior of the machine foundation resting on the geosynthetic reinforced soil bed is not well understood yet. The present study investigates the efficacy of geosynthetics reinforcement in supporting the machine foundations. 3D numerical studies have been performed using the explicit finite difference package FLAC3D. The behaviour of a square footing, 0.6 m wide and 0.5 m deep resting on a non-homogeneous foundation bed has been analysed. Three different cases, namely, unreinforced, geogrid reinforced and geocell reinforced conditions were considered. The analysis was carried out by varying the frequency of the excitation. The depth of placement of geogrid and geocell was varied. From the results, the optimum depth of placement of geogrid and geocell was found to be 0.4B and 0.1B respectively from the ground surface. Similarly, the optimum width of placement of geocell and geogrid was found to be 4B. In overall, the performance of geocell was found to be better than other conditions. In the presence of geocell, displacement amplitude and peak particle velocity were reduced by 44% and 42% respectively as compared to the unreinforced condition. Further, the geocell reinforcement improved the stiffness as well as the resonant frequency by 1.8 and 1.3 times as compared to unreinforced condition.
Menu