NUMERICAL ANALYSIS OF GEOCELL REINFORCED ROAD EMBANKMENTS AND EVALUATION OF EFFECTIVE PARAMETERS ON THE PERFORMANCE OF GEOCELL REINFORCING SYSTEM

The use of reinforced soil has been considered since long ago. Due to the improvement in technology¡ di erent kinds of reinforcement¡ including geosynthetic and steel types¡ have emerged. Geocells¡ as a special type of geosynthetic¡ have recently been used for soil improve- ment. Their three dimensional geometry causes extreme lateral con nement for in ll soil. This phenomenon leads to increased soil deformability and strength properties. The geocell reinforcement system is in the process of practical development due to its several advantages. Based on literature reviews in this eld¡ theories and design methods are far behind applications in the eld¡ especially roadway applications¡ due to a lack of under- standing of their mechanisms and in uencing factors. There are rather extensive laboratory studies in the eld of geocell reinforcement¡ but because of its complexity¡ numerical modeling of geocell reinforcement has rarely been performed and most numerical studies are based on equivalent composite models for representing the strength and sti ness of geocell con ned soil. In a com- posite model¡ the geocell reinforced soil is replaced with a soil with higher parameters. These parameters are se- lected based on limited test results performed on geocell reinforced soil. Therefore¡ generalizing them to other kinds of soil could be accompanied by further errors « In this numerical study¡ geocell and soil were simulated separately in 3D. Hence¡ this numerical modeling has no composite assumptions and errors. Also¡ all key behav- iors of the geocell were included completely. In this paper¡ geocell reinforced road embankments are simulated using the Finite Di erence Method (FDM) of FLAC3D. Geocell was simulated using geogrid struc- tural elements¡ and the elastic-perfectly plastic Mohr- Coulomb model was used for modeling the behavior of soil. In order to verify the modeling¡ results were com- pared with the results of a laboratory test¡ and¡ then¡ di erent factors in uencing reinforced embankment per- formance¡ including soil properties and the placement of geocell layers¡ were investigated.