Improvement of Soft Ground by Employing Granular Piles Below Raft: Fid-Bau Portal

Improvement of Soft Ground by Employing Granular Piles Below Raft

Nath, Dhanraj / Deb, Plaban / Pal, Sujit Kumar

The granular piles are one of the best common and widely used methods in the improvement of ground adopted in weak soils to increase the bearing capacity and reduced in settlement. It has been employed to improve the bearing capacity soils underneath the raft foundation, liquid storage tanks, embankments and other low-rise structures. In this study, the bearing capacity of granular piles reinforced on soft clayey soils under the vertically loaded raft has been studied numerically through finite element software, ABAQUS 3D. In numerical modeling, the soft clayey soil, granular piles materials, and cushion-layer properties are represented by the Mohr–Coulomb model and the raft is taken as a linear elastic material. A parametric study is performed to investigate the effect of number of granular piles below the raft and thickness of the cushion layer provided between raft and granular piles. 4, 9, and 16 numbers of granular piles have been used in this analysis. The diameter (d) and length (L) of each granular pile is taken as 0.8 m and 15 m, respectively, and the spacing between the granular piles are taken as four times of the diameter of the pile (4d). The results indicate that the addition of number of granular piles below the raft increases the bearing capacity of soft soil and reduces the settlement of the foundation. Further, the load–settlement behavior is also studied in case of addition of cushion layer between raft and granular piles and the variation of the thickness of cushion layer. It is also observed from the load–settlement response that the increase in the cushion layer thickness enhances the bearing capacity and reduces the settlement of foundation.