Building over deep soft ground is a very critical engineering problem facing the construction industry worldwide including Malaysia. Apart from reliability/dependency consideration the realization that the few commonly used techniques are generally costly and time consuming. It provides greater justification for wanting the emergence of alternative method(s) which devoid these shortcomings. The Bamboo Geotextile Composite System (CH Tech) technique have been very successfully utilized with commendable performance shown in ALL previous projects built over deep & critically soft grounds like mangrove swamp, peaty swamp and marine clay or a combination thereof. This can be viewed as a positive move towards the effort of adding a highly reliable and dependable ground treatment method for deep soft ground with enormous cost and time savings for the project.In construction over soft ground, excessive and unceasing settlements, may it be total or differential or a combination have caused severe distresses to constructions built above it; may it be geotechnical and/or structural. In addition, the high construction cost plus long project gestation period caused by sophistication of prevailing ground improvement techniques e.g. Piled embankment, PVD cum surcharging etc. The necessity to build temporary staging for the heavy machinery to maneuver on soft ground posed additional cost and problems. In addition to the above shortcomings, frequent failures occurred among some of the commonly used methods further dampen and compound the sufferings of project implementers concerned.
Principle of system depends on the distribution of the load, thereby minimise the stress as well as the equilibrium established will result in achieving more than 90% of the settlement instantaneously during construction.
This will save cost & time as well as finding venue for disposing these materials which are often not welcome.
The presence of the bamboo-grid cum geotextile layer ascertains the quantity of imported fill, otherwise its absence would have allowed the free mixing of the imported fill with the soft soil, leading to tremendous loss of the imported good soil whereby the amount of imported soil cannot be easily quantified.
As compared to some of the traditional methods, surcharging over prolonged period is required, thus project idling is a common sight.
The indigenous population thus participated in the development of the nation and at the same time help to alleviate the state of poverty of he rural population by providing employment.