ABSTRACT
Existing studies confirmed that the response of geosynthetics-reinforced beds is directly affected by contributory factors, including soil's grains, reinforcement's characteristics, and surface loading geometries. In this paper, a series of plate load tests has been carried out for the further understanding of the behaviour of geocell and geogrid-reinforced soil. The considered variables were included with four different soil grains sizes, two different geocell's opening sizes, two different geogrid's aperture sizes and three different loading plate sizes. As it was expected, the geocell and geogrid-reinforced soil exhibited a few times higher bearing capacity than the unreinforced status, up to 524% and 635%, respectively. The results further focused on the important role of scale effect on the response of reinforced foundations. The optimum nominal aperture size of geocells and geogrids were obtained about 15 and 4 times of medium grain size of soil. Also, it was found that in order to obtain the highest reinforcement benefits, the footing's width should be in the range 13 to 27 (20 in average) times of medium grain size of the backfill. Finally, to provide more stable and reliable geocell-reinforced backfill, it is recommended that the aperture size of geocells and geogrids should be selected smaller than 0.67 and 0.2 times of footing width.
