Behaviour of the model surface strip footing on reinforced sand

Abstract

A series of tests were carried out with an eccentrically loaded model surface strip footing on un-reinforced and reinforced dense sand to investigate the behaviour of the footing (decrease in ultimate load with increasing eccentricity, failure surfaces and load displacement relations). The experimental set-up used to run the tests consists of tank, model footing, sand and loading mechanism. A single woven geotextile strip sheet was placed horizontally below the footing’s base at a depth half of the footing’s width. The primary failure surfaces occurred at the eccentricity side for this laterally unrestricted footing. The use of this reinforcement increased the ultimate load by about 50% for centrally loaded strip footing in comparison with un-reinforced case and its contribution to ultimate load decreased as eccentricity increased in these conditions. Geotextile not only increased ultimate load, but also increased necessary amount of vertical displacement of footing to reach failure compared with un-reinforced case. The experimental results are in good agreement with Meyerhof’s effective width concept than the customary analysis and the customary analysis is unsafe outside the core.