Shear strength and deformation characteristics of geosynthetic soil bags stacked horizontal and inclined

摘要

The strength of stacked soil bags is very low when sheared laterally, compared withnthe strength when compressed vertically. To substantially increase the stability of soil structuresncomposed of stacked soil bags, this paper proposes inclined stacking of soil bags so that thencompressive stress on the bag-to-bag interface increases. A series of lateral shear loading testsnwere performed on a pile of three full-scale soil bags stacked horizontally (u0001 ¼ 08) as well asninclined (u0001 ¼ 188) at different vertical confining pressures (30 kPa, 150 kPa and 300 kPa). Twontypes of backfill material were used: a poorly graded fine sand and a well-graded sandy gravel.nThe shear strength of the soil bags was considerably larger when stacked inclined than whennstacked horizontally. With soil bags of sandy gravel, whether stacked horizontally or inclined,nfailure was dominantly always by slippage along the bag-to-bag interface. With soil bags ofnToyoura sand, when stacked inclined at high confining pressure, failure was induced by shearnfailure in the backfill. It is shown that the method of inclined stacking method at a suitable anglenis simple and cost-effective. It is also important to compact soil bags in advance, and to use wellgradedncoarse backfill to increase the interface friction angle, the strength of the backfill and thenconfining pressure in the backfill.