Geotextiles are widely used in various applications including earthen structures, which are oftenbuilt in unsaturated soil conditions. The design of these earthen structures is often dominated bythe shear strength of the interface between soil and reinforcement (i.e. geotextile) layers.However, the unsaturated soil-geotextile interface interactions are not completely understood.This paper examines the shearing behavior of unsaturated soil-geotextile interfaces. Direct sheartest results are used to define failure envelopes for unsaturated soil and soil-goetextile interfaces.Experimental results reveal a nonlinear relationship between the soil-geotextile interface strengthand matric suction. The paper demonstrates that this non-linear failure envelope can be modeledusing the Soil Water Characteristic Curve (SWCC) and saturated effective stress-strengthparameters. The paper also compares the shearing behavior of unsaturated soil and unsaturatedsoil-geotextile interfaces.
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