Behavioral Study of Raft Reinforced with Geogrid and Geocell Through Experiments and Neural Models

The stability of a structure could be achieved either by adopting strong foundation or by improving the strength of the soil. This study is an attempt to investigate the behavior of a raft foundation (U-RF) upon reinforcing with geogrid (RF-R-Gr) and reinforcing with geocell (RF-R-Gc). The results of the study showed that optimal depth for placement of geogrid was found to be 0.3B (B is width of raft) while optimal depth for geocell varied from 0.1B to 0.15B. It was also found that the Bearing Capacity Ratio (BCR) for RF-R-Gr was typically six times higher than U-RF, while for RF-R-Gc it was eleven times higher than U-RF. Further, the outcomes of experimental study were modeled using Artificial Neural Networks (ANN) to predict the settlements. It was found that ANN models predicted settlement with higher values of correlation coefficient (r) as 0.9996 for RF-R-Gr and 0.9995 for RF-R-G.