Pullout Behavior of Plate Anchors in Geotextile Reinforced Soft Clay

Different types of anchors are used for offshore and onshore structures to resist uplift forces. In case of soft clay the uplift capacity may be increased with geotextile reinforcements. In the present study an attempt has been made to find uplift capacity of model plate anchors of sizes 50 mm × 50 mm and 75 mm × 75 mm, in reinforced and unreinforced soil with embedment ratios of 1, 2, and 3. Properties of clay and geotextile have been appropriately obtained by carrying out relevant laboratory tests. Model anchor tests have been carried out by applying monotonic loads through pulley arrangement and recording displacements using Linear Variable Differential Transformer (LVDT). To supplement the experimental results, numerical analyses have been carried out using ABAQUS software, simulating experimental models with similar plate sizes and embedment ratios. The experimental results agree well with the numerical ones. The geotextile layer has been considered to be placed for an extent of four times the anchor width at a distance of 0.25 times the embedment depth from the bottom of the anchor. It has been observed that pullout capacity increases with increase of plate size on an average by 113% for unreinforced clay when the plate size increases from 50 to 75 mm. For 50 mm plate with embedment ratio equal to 1 the improvement has been found to be 25% and the same has been found to be 36% and 31% for embedment ratio 2 and 3, respectively. This improvement has been found to be higher for larger plate sizes.