Settlement of Shallow Foundations near Reinforced Slopes Mehdi Raftari Department of Civil Engineering, Khorramabad Branch, Islamic Azad University, Khorramabad, Iran
[email protected] Prof. Dr. Khairul Anuar Kassim Department of Geotechnics & Transportation, Faculty of Civil Engineering, UTM, Johor, Malaysia
[email protected] Dr. Ahmad Safuan A.Rashid Department of Geotechnics & Transportation, Faculty of Civil Engineering, UTM, Johor, Malaysia
[email protected] Hossein Moayedi Faculty of Engineering, Kermanshah University of Technology Kermanshah, Iran
[email protected] ABSTRACT Nowadays, there are many situations that foundations are built near the slopes. To design such foundations large settlement towards the slope are expected. To reduce the settlement as well as increasing the bearing ratio, using the geosynthetic reinforcement is common. In some cases the slope is reinforced and this reinforcement could have a significant impact on decrease of shallow foundation settlement on it. In this paper we selected five different slopes from the Lorestan province located in Iran and reinforced it with the appropriate reinforcement. To analyze the models using the Finite Element Method (FEM), the Plaxis 8.2 was used. Firstly, the settlements of shallow foundation on both reinforced and unreinforced slope were compared. Then other important parameters such as number of layers, vertical spacing between layers, and distance from foundation to slope crest during the design of reinforced structures were tested. As a result, the nearer placement of the footing to crest of the slope increases the settlement, however using the reinforcement could significantly decreases the mentioned settlement. KEYWORDS: Geosynthetic; Reinforced slope; Plaxis; Finite Element analysis INTRODUCTION Increase in the bearing capacity of shallow foundations on slopes is being always one of the concerns for designers to design appropriate structures such as building’s foundations, roads, and railways[1].