Improving the bearing capacity of soft soil beds by using of stone columns

The benefit of using stone columns in low strength soil has been proved as an efficient method to improve load-carrying characteristics of shallow footings. The stone column bearing capacity mainly depends on circumferential confinement providing by native soft soils. In this paper, some large body laboratory tests were performed on stone columns with diameters of 60, 80, and 100 mm and a length to diameter of 5. Both unreinforced and encased geotextile reinforced stone columns were tested. Vertical Encased Stone Column (VESC) has been considered to investigate the effect of reinforcement on the footing load-carrying characteristics. Results show that the stone column bearing capacity increases by using vertical reinforcing material. With increasing the length and strength of reinforcement in VESC, the stone column bearing capacity increases.