Keupayaan galas tanah liat lembut bertetulang menggunakan gabungan buluh - geotekstil

Abstract

Soft Clays are found throughout the coastal plains of Malaysia, central plain of Thailand and eastern side of the island of Sumatra, Indonesia. Soft Clay present several challenges for the geotechnical engineers whereby these problems being transformed to stability and settlement within the soft soil. The choice of the ground improvement method for a given structure to suit the soils of such nature needs to ensure that the above mentioned aspects are taken into consideration. General stabilization of these soils usually involves expensive soil improvement method in order to enhance stability suitably reducing the potential and prevailing uneven settlement. Due to that, studies on soft clay reinforced with bamboo-geotextile composite overlaid by granular layer had been carried out to determine the increase in the bearing capacity the soil. The bamboo used were of square and parallel pattern of different length (s), with various ratio of height of granular soil (u) to width of footing (b), u/b = 0.25, 0.50 and 0.75 while s/b = 3.0, 2.0, 1.0 and 0.5.The geotextile was laid on top of the bamboo. The soft clay was consolidated over a three days period. Vertical load, controlled by electric motor, was applied slowly to the strip loading plate of 5cm width (b) on top of the soil model assembly, and settlements of the plate were measured using transducers attached to a data logger. The results show that there is a great increase in ultimate load and decrease of settlement at failure for the reinforced model. The load increment of more than 127 % was recorded for square and parallel pattern, having the s/b = 0.50 at u/b = 0.25. From the results of the plotted graph, it shows that the bamboo arranged in square pattern gives better results than the parallel pattern. As a conclusion, the bamboo-geotextile composite could be used as another alternative method in improving the strength of soft clay, especially in highway engineering.