Behavior of sand columns reinforced by vertical geotextile encasement and horizontal geotextile layers

In this paper, the effect of a group of sand columns in the loose soil bed using triaxial tests was studied. To investigate the effect of geotextile reinforcement type on the bearing capacity of these sand columns, Vertical encased sand columns (VESCs) and horizontally reinforced sand columns (HRSCs) were used. Number of sixteen independent triaxial tests and finite element simulation were performed on specimens with a diameter of 100 mm and a height of 200 mm. Specimens were reinforced by either a single sand column or three sand columns with the same area replacement ratio (16%) to evaluate the Influence of the column arrangement. Effect the number of sand columns, the length of vertical encasement and the number of horizontal reinforcing layers were investigated, in terms of bearing capacity improvement and economy. The results indicated that the ultimate bearing capacity of the samples with three ordinary sand columns (OSCs) is eventually about 11% more than samples with an OSC. Also, comparison of the column reinforcing modes showed that four horizontal layers of geotextile achieved similar performance to a vertical encasement geotextile at the 50% of the column height, from the viewpoint of strength improvement, while from the viewpoint of economy, the geotextile needed for encasing the single column is around 2.5 times of the geotextile required for four layers.