Study on Square Footing Supported on Geocell – Tire Crumb Reinforced Granular Soil

Weak or soft soil is considered unsafe for construction of engineering structures. To bring about improvement in such soil, ground improvement techniques are utilised commonly in these days in which the engineer forces the ground to adopt the project’s requirements, by altering natural state of the soil, instead of having to alter the design in response to ground natural limitation. In this present study, tire crumbs from waste have been chosen as the reinforcement material for soil improvement. Another viable alternative to enhance the strength of the soft soils is the adaptation of technique involving the use of geocell mattress which is a three dimensional, polymeric, honeycomb like structure interconnected at joints. The results of the model load tests show that the stiffness and the load carrying capacity of the soil improve substantially with the provision of geocell reinforcement. In addition to it tire crumb’s optimum content has also been discussed which gives maximum bearing capacity as compared to unreinforced soil.