Design Method of Spread Footing Reinforced by Geosynthetics

토목섬유를 이용한 확대기초의 설계법 연구

New design method about the spread footing was developed using only soil and geosynthetics. This footing will be able to replace the concrete footing at constructing the foundation of small structures. As shown in Fig-3(b), after excavating the ground in semicircular shape, geosynthetics is layed on the semicircular shape of ground and let the soil filled. Geosynthetics of upper side are fixed tightly each other It can be thought to be a kind of great bag with semicircular shape. We performed two kinds of experiments to investigate the deformation and the failure shape of spread footing reinforced by geosynthetics. First, after making model ground with aluminium rods, the lattice point of 1cm ${\times}$ 1cm size of the side of aluminium rods have been painted with various kinds of colors. We have observed the movement of painted rods during loading. Second, we have taken pictures about failure process using B-shutter method. Analysing the behavior of model ground reinforced in a semicircular shape, we could know the reinforced one has much greater and wider plastic area than unreinforced one at failure. Based on the experimental results, new design method was proposed, which has a possibility to apply at the field works.