Soil-geosynthetic interaction: interface parameters in granular soils

Abstract

Intensive research on soil/geosynthetic interface behaviour have been developed, since 1995, by a research group of the Faculty of Engineering of Porto University. In this research soil/geosynthetic interface behaviour was characterized by performing pullout, direct shear and inclined shear tests with different types of geosynthetics, namely, geotextiles, geogrids and geomembranes confined by granular soils. An overall treatment of the research collected data from geogrids pullout tests will be presented, in order to define correlations between the interface coefficient, f, and the application conditions of different types of geogrids and confining materials. By applying statistical analysis to the different correlations it was possible to obtain a general equation for the interface resistance coefficient, f, function of the soil compaction conditions, confining stress and geogrids structure, which is the corollary of the present research.