Influence of geocell on bearing capacity and settlement of railway embankments: an experimental study

Despite using geocell for many geotechnical purposes, the application of geocell on the mechanical behaviour of railway embankments have been less investigated in the technical literature. To this end, this paper aims to investigate the effect of geocell layers on both bearing capacity and settlement of railway embankments. In this regard, six 1:20 scaled down railway embankments were constructed in the lab environment. The embankments consisted an unreinforced embankment and four geocell-reinforced embankments including 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5 geocell layers reinforcement in which geocell layers were placed non-spacing in the embankment body from the crest to down. After installation of linear variable differential transformers (LVDTs) and load cells, each embankment was subjected to a gradually uniform load on the crest until the occurrence of the failure while the data were recorded simultaneously. The results have shown that adding geocell layers up to 4 layers results in improving both bearing capacity and settlement of the embankments while adding the fifth geocell layer represented a performance almost such as reinforced embankments with 4 layers. However, embankment reinforced using four geocell layers showed the maximum bearing capacity and minimum settlement by 38.6 and 37%, respectively, in comparison with the unreinforced model.