Evaluation of the main factors in uencing the behavior of strip footings on geogrid reinforced soils

Soils reinforced by geogrids exhibit dierent behavior, compared to unreinforced soils, due to having high tensile strength elements. In this paper, the main factors in uencing the behavior of such reinforced soil under a strip footing are investigated and discussed. A numerical model for the reinforced soil is developed using FLAC-2D nite dierence software. The model is calibrated, and then dierent important factors, such as width, number, distance and depth of the rst layer of geogrid, are studied and evaluated. The qualitative behavior of the reinforced soil under dierent conditions of reinforcement elements is also studied in this work. The results of several analyses show that the optimum depth of the rst layer of geogrid is one fourth of the footing width, and the other layers would have eective role up to 1.75 times of the width. Also, the distance between geogrid layers needs to be decreased in case of increasing their number whose optimum value is less than half of the footing width. The geogrid width and its tensile strength have considerable eect on the behavior of the reinforced soil when geogrid layers are in optimum position.