The Effect of Stabilized Clayey Soil with Tire Chips on Piled Raft Foundation Behavior

In conventional design of pile foundations, all loads are taken by the piles, i.e. the contact pressure between the raft and the soil is neglected. In the last decades, geotechnical engineers have started to take this pressure into account in design of pile foundation. Such a foundation, where the raft and the piles interact to transfer the loads to the ground, is in this dissertation called piled raft foundation or piled raft.
Waste tires, rubbers and plastic materials, normally produced in every society, enter the environment and cause serious problems. These problems may, to some extent, be reduced by finding applications for them in engineering, for example,they can be used for geotechnical applications as backfill material and solving problems with low shear strength soils like clayey soil. Therefore, this experimental work has been performed to investigate the influence of randomly oriented fiber inclusion on the geotechnical behavior of clayey soils. In general, some characteristic properties of tire materials are the low density, high elasticity, low stiffness and high drainage capacity. These properties open up possibilities for utilization of the material in an innovative manner. By adding small quantities of rubber chips in the soils, the natural elasticity of rubber could help lower the stiffness of the stabilized material and introduce more flexibility in the final stabilized columnar system.