Experimental and theoretical investigation for highways incorporating geotextile design methodology

The main aim of this paper is to examine the effects of the geotextiles for unpaved roads by changing tensile strength and number of reinforcement layers. Laboratory triaxial tests were conducted to investigate the stress and strain behaviours of the samples. Four different woven geotextile types with different tensile strength properties were used for reinforced sample models, and the number of reinforcement layers (N) were changed as one, two and three in each test. Then, simple regression analyses were made according to test results. Different reinforcement conditions were discussed, and new calculation methods for geotextile reinforced highway designs were proposed according to different number of reinforcement layers, tensile strengths and axial strains. Validation analysis was made to see the importance of the new calculation models. Analytical and statistic calculation equations to predict to strength of reinforced models were verified experimentally. Additionally, the failure patterns were compared with different conditions and literature studies. Lastly, the finite element model was used to compare the failure patterns with the test results, and a good correlation was seen.