behavior of two plate groups in reinforced soil under uplift load

Anchor plates in groups are widely used to increase the uplift performance of foundations for different structures. in this study, the influence of embedment depth, geogrid stiffness, and soil-geogrid interface friction angle on the behavior of geogrid-reinforced groups anchors was investigated through experimental and numerical analyses. for this, a series of model tests with varied embedment depths (i.e., h/b = 2, 4, 6, 8) were performed. it was seen that the performance of the two plate groups was significantly increased at all embedment depths. interestingly, the anchor plates undergo apparent failure in the range of 2–15% of anchor displacement in case of unreinforced sand at all embedment depths, whereas, in the case of geogrid reinforcement, it continued to take increased loading beyond anchor displacement of 40%. the performance improvement of group anchor plates due to geogrid support, was maximum at shallow embedment depth (h/b = 2) which was found to be in order of 3, whereas, it gradually reduces to 1.5 at deeper depth (i.e., h/b = 8). besides, the results obtained from the 3-d numerical model show a satisfactory fit with the experimental results. the uplift performance of shallow and deep two plate groups was also found to have increased with increased stiffness of reinforcement and soil-geogrid interface friction angle.