Long term tensile testing of polyolefin fibers in geotextiles

摘要

With several types of geotextiles applied to steep slopes, e.g. geocomposite clay liners (GCL), polyolefin fibers inten-lionally sustain permanent tension. In many applications especially for permanent slope stability these load-bearing fibers may not break at relevant environmental conditions. Moisture and/or precipitation will occur in most cases and must be considered as important environmental factor. This is strongly emphasized by our results arising from long term tensile testing of fibers in water in a novel test design. It is shown that fiber rupture may occur not only after extended creep, as expected when tested in air. Instead, fibers immersed into water break after relatively small strains and load levels and virtually without any onset. In this case the times to failure cannot be estimated alone by the analysis of creep data, as usually assumed. It is possible, however, to characterize the performance of fibers using our long-term tensile load test.