Geosynthetics Assingment -2

BEARING CAPACITY ANALYSIS OF REINFORCED

EARTH SLABS REVIEW
-Vivek Roy (CE14S016)

A series of model tests was carried out by Binquet et.al (1975) to determine the effect of
reinforcing the earth base, on the bearing capacity of strip footing. It was evident from the
test results that the presence of reinforcement showed significant increase in the ultimate
bearing capacity and correspondingly the settlement resistance. They observed that the
failure of the footing on reinforced homogenous soil was different in comparison to without
that of reinforcement. Thus they put forth a failure hypothesis that forms the background
for the bearing capacity analyses and compared the results with experimental data.

CRITIC
The failure hypothesis put forth, accounts all the types of possibilities in three classes
and can be viewed as being devised under the condition of the footing and the
reinforced soil at limiting equilibrium condition, beyond which the footing will be
incapable of satisfying any functional requirements. But in actual the soil or the
reinforcement could have failed much earlier before attaining the limiting condition.

The analysis assumes the equal generation so same stress intensity of each layer of
the reinforcing material which is a conservative assumption as we know that the
stress intensity of the medium depends of its depth from the surface, hence the
tensile material will have different resistances based on its depth.

Even though with many varied assumptions, they have identified that the tensile
material breaks at the assumed slip surfaces.

Most of the strip footings of a building will tend to carry different amount of loads
due to which differential settlement is an issue, and the aforementioned analysis is
incapable of determining the required reinforcing material required.

Soils exhibit significant amount of linearity when need to be analysed under limiting
condition, thus the assumption of linear elastic theory to determine the stresses will
yield higher stress than in actual for the corresponding strain.

When a strip footing of considerable length is reinforced with tensile material, then
under service loads the tensile resistance developed in a reinforcement placed at the
edge of the strip footing and the one placed right under the centre in the middle of
the strip footing will be different. But the analysis has assumed a uniform

distribution of load with equal resistances generated regardless of longitudinal

distance along the strip footing, such that it reduces to a plain strain condition of unit
length of the footing.

The assumption that the vertical stress is small at large distances from the centre
line, has to be sufficiently addressed for a possible presence of surcharge(footing) on
the nearby soil, as in practical conditions it is impossible to place strip footing s to
support a building at large distances.

The determination of criticality T f & R y by comparing with TD to define tie pull-out

or tie breaking may yield satisfactory results for homogenous soil conditions and
maybe incapable of addressing stratified soil layers where the modulus of the soil
varies with depth.

COMMENTS ON TEST DATA

The experimental results of the analysis put forth satisfactorily coincides with the
test data for a homogenous condition and the positions at which the limiting
conditions was achieved also reveals a significant agreement at all values of
settlement ratio.
But it is evident from the plot of comparison for the Series B tests that there is wide
variation between the observed and the proposed BCR relations and also the limiting
conditions. This may be attributed to the employment of a linear elastic FEM to
determine the stress, as also mentioned previously that at limiting conditions where
it is analysed the soil would be non-linear state.
Similar disagreements were also visible in the Series C tests, from which we can
clearly conclude that the proposed failure mechanism doesnt exist as singleton
entities but occurs as a combination of it.
Series C tests exhibited that when the proposed analysis method is used to
determine the limiting ultimate bearing capacity condition (settlement ratio = 15%),
it showed remarkable coincidence with the test data, but in practical conditions
where foundations maybe designed to resist other limit states then this analysis will
be incapable .

CONCLUSION
From the series of the tests and the analysis put forth we can grossly determine the type
of failure mechanism that might occur and then address it in designing backed with
analysis based on rigorous FE analysis. Not only knowing the type of failure, we can also
get a brief knowledge about the factors that may influence this failure and thus aid in
design process. Overall it is an approximate way to analysis the problem of strip footings
on reinforced earth.