The Transport Research Laboratory has undertaken a programme of work to assess the effect of installation damage on the short term strength of geosynthetics. Trials were undertaken using a coarse grained aggregate and three woven fabrics, a strip material, and three geogrids. The changes in strength of the geosynthetics were determined from tests on both 200mm and one metre wide specimens at strain rates of 10% per minute and 2.5% per hour.
For geosynthetics which are either robust or particularly susceptible to installation damage, the effects of specimen width and strain rate on the measured change in strength is small. However the situation is less clear for other geosynthetics. It would appear that the variability of the measured tensile strength decreases with increasing of width of the test specimens. Thus it may be better to undertake tensile tests on a few larger specimens than on a large number of smaller specimens.
Menu