The Behavior of Strip Footing Resting on Soil Strengthened with Geogrid

The soil in Iraq has a low load carrying or bearing capacity and high deflections or settlement because of the applied loads. The use of strip footing as a foundation to support different kinds of heavy structures has become necessary nowadays through solving such problems by using geogrid. This soil improvement technique is widely used all over the world. In this paper, the bearing capacity and settlements were calculated using finite elements and analytical models for strip footing resting on different kinds of soil. The study parameters are footing rigidity, the number of layers in a geogrid, the dimension of geogrid, and spacing of geogrid layers. According to the findings, the geogrid improved the bearing ability of the footing and reduced settlement. The optimum geogrid dimension was three times the footing width, and three geogrid layers were optimum. The changing in footing rigidity also affects the stress and settlement behavior.