2009 Volume 24 Pages 75-82
Reinforcement, such as strips, woven-geotextiles and geogrids, is used to tensile-reinforce the backfill of soil structures in recent civil engineering applications. However, the use of geo-cells as tensile reinforcement has been quite limited, but geo-cells have been often used to restrain the foundation ground from horizontal spreading when subjected to vertical load by, for example, embankment, light-weight houses and traffic. Geo-cells have such advantages as that large-particles can be contained inside the cells and respective cells have a large anchorage capacity when pull laterally. On the other hand, conventional type geo-cells are not designed to have a high global stiffness when pull laterally. To examine whether geocells can be function as tensile reinforcing when used to reinforce the backfill of, for example, retaining walls and foundations. A series of laboratory tests were performed to evaluate the pull-out resistance of small-scaled models of geo-cell having different heights and lengths under two different normal pressures of 1 kPa and 30 kPa at the crest of the backfill in which the geo-cell models were arranged. Significant effects of the length of geo-cell layer on the pullout resistance were found, while the effects of the height of geo-cell were insignificant. The progress deformation of geo-cell in the direction of pull-out due to a rather low global stiffness was confirmed. The test results indicate that the pullout resistance of geo-cell can increase significantly by changing the structure of geo-cells to that the global tensile stiffness largely increases. The test results also suggested that geo-cells may function as tensile reinforcement particularly used with gravelly soil.
