A Study on the Confined Effects of Highly Moistured Soils Reinforced with Geosynthetics

This study confirms reinforcing effect of geosynthetics in the use of soil at higher water contents as a compaction material on compaction tests, field compaction tests, and numerical analysis. To verify a confined effect, a large mold(area ratio of rammer / mold = 0.19) larger than D compaction mold(area ratio of rammer / mold = 0.33) was performed for compaction. It showed that in the D compaction test, dry density were 0.5∼0.6% increases and in the compaction test using the large mold, it were 2.4∼3.7% increases at high water contents. It shows that when the area of compacted area is large enough, a confined effect could be arising from the reinforcement of geosynthetics even at high water contents. As a result of analyzing of compaction effects according to ‘depth(z/B) from compacted surface’ in the field, when not reinforced, the compaction state deteriorated due to the over-compaction and the compaction did not work well. However, when reinforcement of geosynthetics, restraint effect by geosynthetics occurs, it is confirmed that the compaction energy is effectively transferred to the compaction layer and the dry density is increased. Also, through the conceptual model of the behavior of geosynthetic and soil layer, the mechanism in the ground due to reinforcement of geosynthetics is presented and it is verified through finite element analysis.