Geocell geosynthetics have been used in several areas of geotechnical engineering, such as retaining walls, slope protection against erosion, road bases and channel lining. However, geocell was initially designed to improve soil bearing capacity. Performing works in soft soils is always a challenge to geotechnical engineering and involves risks, such as (global and local) soil failures and large settlements. As reinforcement, geocell satisfactorily increases the bearing capacity of the soil, enabling its use. In this regard, this paper presents a method for predicting the bearing capacity of geocell-reinforced soils, taking into account the soil foundation bearing capacity and the geocell reinforcement mechanisms – the stress dispersion effect and the confinement effect. The proposed method is verified with the results of laboratory experiments by several researchers and compared with other calculation methods. The results show that the calculated bearing capacity obtained by this method give a better fit to the experimental results than other methods. The method also proved to be a good approach for different geocell characteristics (geometry), foundation soil and geocell infill (sand and clay) and loading shape (circular, rectangular and strip).

Bridges constitute an important part of the infrastructure and are subjected to damage and deterioration of materials and support conditions, as well as exposure to adverse environmental conditions. Continuous or repeated monitoring of structural responses may add important information for decision-making regarding their maintenance, repair and reinforcement. The use of these data, in conjunction with techniques of structural reliability for the treatment of the uncertainties, allows a better understanding of the structural behaviour and integrity. Modern Information and Communication Technologies can greatly contribute to the improvement of the maintenance capacity and, consequently, to the reliability of the assets and to their operational availability. New wireless communication technologies, such as 5 G networks, are considered as the enabling technologies of the digital transformation, integrated with the concept of the Internet of Things. High connectivity capacity and intensive automation enable, for example, changes in inspection paradigms and asset maintenance, by transferring the product focus to service platforms, bringing gains to productivity, comfort, operational safety and costs. New predictive maintenance approaches, which make use of a large amount of data available, can improve the efficiency of maintenance processes, producing more accurate and reliable anticipated diagnostics. The Digital Twins incorporate all these tools and allow a real-time view of the evolution of the asset behaviour. This concept applied to a railway bridge is presented and discussed in detail in this paper.

The paper reports laboratory investigations carried out on a tropical soil profile to study its compressibility, strength, critical state and limit state conditions, and their variation with depth. The soil profile comprises a reddish lateritic layer (horizon B) underlain by a saprolitic soil (horizon C) from which a number of block samples were taken. A series of isotropic and anisotropic compression tests, and drained and undrained triaxial tests, were conducted on specimens sampled at depths between 1.0 and 7.0 m, and also in the exposed saprolitic soil. Special triaxial tests, with the pore pressure increased to induce failure, were performed to investigate the failure at low stress levels. On this basis a tensile cutoff on the failure envelope was defined. In order to assess the influence of the natural soil structure, drained and undrained triaxial tests were carried out on compacted samples obtained from depths of 1.0 and 5.0 m. Higher strength parameters were measured for the horizon C soil, which...