Effect of Infill Material on the Performance of Tough-Cell-Reinforced Bases
Tests in this study demonstrated that Neoloy® Tough-Cells can significantly improve the performance of inferior quality infill
In this study, Neoloy Tough-Cell reinforced bases were filled with three different infill materials. The performance of different infill materials in terms of bearing capacity, stiffness, permanent deformation, and percentage elastic deformation of the bases was studied.
- Plate load tests carried out to assess how Neoloy Tough-Cell reinforcement impacts inferior quality infill materials.
- Tests found that they significantly improved the performance of inferior quality infill materials, such as sand and quarry waste, compared to unreinforced bases.
Neoloy Tough-Cell, due to its three-dimensional structure, can effectively provide lateral confinement to infill material to increase the stiffness and bearing capacity of base courses and to reduce their permanent deformations under repeated loading. However, limited studies have so far been done to investigate the effect of infill material on the performance of geocell-reinforced bases. In this study, three different infill materials, poorly-graded Kansas River sand, quarry waste (QW), and well-graded AB-3 aggregate, were used. The performance of different infill materials in terms of bearing capacity, stiffness, permanent deformation, and percentage elastic deformation of the Tough-Cell-reinforced bases was studied in the experiment study. The test results show that the benefit of the Tough-Cell in the bearing capacity and stiffness of the reinforced base under static loading was more evident when a weaker infill material was used. However, the benefit of stronger infill materials became more evident under repeated loading. Under the same magnitude of repeated loading, permanent deformations of reinforced bases were significantly reduced and the percent of elastic deformations were significantly increased for all infill materials as compared with those of unreinforced bases.
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