Scale Effect on the Behavior of Geotextile-Reinforced Soil Under Square Footing

The present research investigates how footing width affects the geotextile-reinforced clay soil's bearing capability. A numerical simulation of footing width was used to examine how bearing ca-pacity changes with width, and several laboratory experiments were conducted to investigate how footing width affects the behavior of reinforced soil. The results display that as footing width in-creases, so does the load bearing capacity; this effect was most pronounced between 80 and 250 mm, after which there was little difference in the bearing capacity settlement curves. Depending on the reinforcement ratio Rr, the impact of the bearing capacity ratio in reinforced soil may vary as the footing width changes. The BCR barely changed when the footing width was changed at Rr of 4. The models with larger footing widths had a higher BCR than those with smaller footing widths at reinforcement ratios below 4. BCR values for smaller model scales were higher for reinforcement ratios larger than 4.