ABSTRACT
A wide range of treatments has been proposed to improve soft soils. However, increasing construction costs and combining with today's environmental considerations will undoubtedly make the need for alternative materials. Expanded Polystyrene (EPS) geofoam is a superlight weight geosynthetic material used in various geotechnical engineering applications. This study deals with the innovative use of geofoam as a column in the soft soil for improving the load-carrying capacity. A series of numerical analysis was carried out on the various single floating geofoam columns with diameters of 80 mm and 100 mm and the length of 400 mm and 500 mm, respectively. Then, the results of the analysis were compared with the results of ordinary stone columns and vertical encasement stone columns with the geotextile to obtain the benefits of geofoam columns. The load-carrying capacity of the geofoam column is almost equal to the load-carrying capacity of an ordinary stone column. However, this amount is smaller than vertical encasement stone columns. The lateral deformation of the columns was investigated for all types of columns. The bulging in geofoam columns is smaller than the ordinary stone column.
