Sustainable Soil Bearing Capacity Improvement Using Natural Limited Life Geotextile Reinforcement—A Review

Geotextiles are commercially made from synthetic fibres and have been used to enhance bearing capacity and to reduce the settlement of weak soil foundations. Several efforts have been made to investigate the possibility of using bio-based geotextiles for addressing environmental issues. This paper attempts to review previous studies on the bearing capacity improvement of soils reinforced with bio-based geotextiles under a vertical static load. The bearing capacity of the unreinforced foundation was used as a reference to illustrate the role of bio-based geotextiles in bearing capacity improvement. The effects of first geotextile depth to footing width ratio (d/B), geotextile spacing to footing width ratio (S/B), geotextile length to footing width ratio (L/B) and the number of reinforcement layers (N) on the bearing capacity were reviewed and presented in this paper. The optimum d/B ratio, which resulted in the maximum ultimate bearing capacity, was found to be in the range of 0.25–0.4. The optimum S/B ratio was in the range of 0.12–0.5. The most suitable L/B ratio, which resulted in better soil performance against vertical pressure, was about 3. Besides, the optimum number of layers providing the maximum bearing capacity was about three This article is useful as a guideline for a practical design and future research on the application of the natural geotextiles to improve the short-term bearing capacity of weak soil foundations in various sustainable geotechnical applications.