الفهرس 
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Abstract
Due to the over-increasing demand for land space of increased
construction activity worldwide, there is increasing needs to improve soft
soil grounds which otherwise are unsuitable for adopting the conventional
shallow foundations. Using deep foundations, such as piles, to by-pass the
weak soil is often costly. Ground improvement technique is a potential
alternative to mitigate this problem. Amongst the various ground
improvement techniques used for improving the in-situ ground conditions,
geosynthetics reinforcement and stone column technique are probably the
most versatile ones. This is primarily due to their simplicity, ease of
construction and overall economy that finds favor with the practicing
engineers. Stone columns and geosynthetic reinforced sand beds are
effective methods to improve foundation performance on soft clay soil.
Although their individual applications have been extensively studied, the
combined application of both has remained unexplored.
The current thesis presents a series of numerical model tests which run
to simulate the construction of footing rests on soft clay without any
improvements (Case 1: soft clay only), then it was run with single or group
of ordinary stone columns, without encasement, (Case 2: OSC) and with
single or group of encased stone columns only (Case 3: ESC) installed in
soft clay soil. Also, the model was run with an unreinforced sand bed only
(Case 4: USB) or with geosynthetic reinforced sand bed (Case 5: GRSB).
Finally, the model was run with the combined application of unreinforced
sand bed placed over single or group of encased stone columns