approach

Abstract: When designing structures that will impose a significant load over a large area, such as buildings, tanks, walls, slopes or embankments, geotechnical engineers must address the following situations, especially when dealing with weak foundation soils: bearing capacity failures, intolerable total and differential settlements, large lateral pressures and movement, and slope instability. The construction of reinforced soil foundations to support a shallow spread footing has considerable potential as a cost-effective alternative to conventional methods of foundation support. With this technique, more than one layer of geogrid reinforcement is placed within layers of engineering fill material under the footing to create a composite material with improved performance characteristics. Here an attempt is made to present the details of an investigation of the performance of geogrid reinforcement in soil. For this purpose, model isolated footing load tests were conducted on soil with and without multi-layers of geogrid at different depths below the footing. The load settlement characteristic for each soil-geogrid configuration was observed. The influence of various selected parameters on the load settlement behavior were studied and critically appraised for their practical significance. The paper discusses the mechanisms of this system using a large-scale model footing for a case studies in which geogrid-reinforced soil footing is used for a schools project in Saudi Arabia. That site has a very sof