Advanced bioinspired cellular confinement systems for improving the performance of reinforced soil beds

With the major developments that occurred during the past 40 years in the geotechnical engineering field, the usage of reinforcements in soils has been very common to improve the ultimate bearing capacity and reduce the footing settlements. These reinforcements consist of geogrids, geotextiles, geocells, etc., all of which are in the geosynthetic family. Among these geosynthetic families, geocell performs better in soil-reinforced beds. In this study, we proposed the nine types of bioinspired geocells to improve the soil beds. For this purpose, a total of twenty numerical models were calculated via FLAC 3D after validating the laboratory model tests in the literature. The numerical results demonstrated that, except for the circular type, the performance of other geocell forms regarding increased bearing capacity was nearly identical. Regarding diffusion angles, only the circular and honeycomb geocells exhibited larger diffusion angles. The opening pocket diameter more significantly influenced the stress and strain of geocells. Geocells with nearly circular shapes, such as circular, honeycomb, hexagonal, and square, typically demonstrated higher confining stresses within the geocell walls. Conversely, for shapes that deviate from the circular form, such as diamond, re-entrant, and double V-shaped designs, the irregularity of the pocket shape could cause an uneven distribution of confining stresses, potentially leading to higher normal deformations at some specific areas and stress concentration at the wall joints.