2001 Volume 16 Pages 9-12
Short fiber-reinforced earth construction methods in which non-continuous geosynthetic filaments are mixed uniformly with soil aggregates are being developed recently for the purposes of improving the mechanical properties of shear strength and strain-dependent toughness of the reinforced soils. In addition this method has some beneficial functions in wide-range environmental applications such as the re-use of poor surplus soils produced in the construction sites and stabilizing the steep slopes providing the vegetation base. At present insufficient knowledge is available regarding to effects of material, shape, size, flexibility, surface fiction and other fundamental properties of short fiber on the mechanical behavior. A newly developed short fibers with several side branches (so called ribbed-type fiber) is employed in order to not only improve their reinforcement effects but also to be able to exclude the fibers without great effort in case of reuse of the soils. In this study effects of the mixing rate of the fibers on the reinforcing mechanism are investigated using an unconfined compression test and a large box shear test (box size: 320×400×240mm).
