CALCULATION OF VERTICAL DEFORMATIONS OF THE FOUNDATIONS ON THE SOFT SOIL IMPROVED BY GEOTEXTILE ENCASED STONE COLUMNS
The article provides information on research in the field of improving weak clay bases by installing vertical soil piles in a shell of geosynthetic materials (geotextile encased stone columns). This method has proven to be effective for strengthening the foundations of large areal objects in certain soil conditions, but has not become widespread as a method for improving the foundations of building foundations, which, among other things, is due to the lack of simple engineering methods for calculating the improvement parameters. The article presents an engineering technique for determining the settlement of shallow foundations on a weak clay base which is improved by the geotextile encased stone columns. The technique is based on considering the elementary cell of the improved foundation for which the pressure distribution in the weak soil and the improvement element is determined by the iterative enumeration process. This distribution should ensure equality of the vertical deformations of the improvement element and the soft soil, which should be the same due to the stiffness of the foundation of the building or structure. The calculation of the deformations of a geotextile encased stone columns is carried out by solving the Lamé problem and the deformations of soft soil by standard methods presented in the regulatory literature. Comparison of the calculation results by the proposed method with the data of numerical modeling in an axisymmetric setting is presented. In the numerical modeling of the soil, the Mohr-Coulomb elastic-plastic model was used. Geosynthetic reinforcement was modeled using a special element that only accepts tensile stresses. The rigidity of the foundation of the base is taken to be infinitely large. The analysis of the presented simulation results showed good convergence of the calculations with the data of experimental studies and the data of numerical simulation using the finite element method.