In Brazil, there are abundant natural materials known as tropical soils, which are often not used in engineering works due to its low load-bearing capacity. One of the technologies available to control the manifestation of pathologies, increase the service life of the pavement and reduce the thickness of the base layer is the use of geosynthetics as reinforcement. Thus, to study the possibility of the use of local cohesive tropical soils, with fine granulometry, in infrastructure works reinforced with geosynthetics, combined with the drying effect of the soil, constitutes a great attraction from a technical and economic point of view. This work evaluates the increase of stiffness provided by the variation of moisture content (matrix suction) and grain size structure of a cohesive tropical (lateritic clay) soil and a woven geotextile. Monotonic Pullout tests were carried out on a small equipment under three soil condition (“O” Optimum, “S” Dry and “SP” Dry Post-Compaction) and two levels of confining stresses (14 and 28 kPa), in addition Wide Width Tensile tests. The monotonic pullout tests evaluated the soil-geosynthetic interaction under constant displacement, for the calculation of the confined stiffness of the geosynthetic (Jc). The wide width tensile tests were performed to evaluate the unconstrained stiffness of the woven geotextile (Jn). The “S” molding condition, compacted with a higher compaction energy in relation to the other conditions, which consequently altered its soil structure, presented the best performance.
Menu