Numerical evaluation of tire chips-filled trench barriers for effective vibration isolation

Ground vibrations induced by man-made sources like vibrating machinery, vehicular movement, traffic, construction activities involving pile driving, blasting, dynamic compaction, etc., are rising rapidly and may disrupt nearby sensitive equipment, distress, and damage sub-structures. Therefore, vibration isolation is necessary to mitigate ground-borne vibrations with suitable techniques in the present-day context. Trench barriers are one of the most efficient techniques when the other isolation techniques are inefficient at the source. Although the open trench barriers are the most efficient, their stability is still a significant concern. Hence, these trenches are generally filled with suitable absorbing materials such as sawdust, geofoam, and concrete. The present study has attempted to explore the feasibility of using shredded tire chips as an infill material by evaluating their performance using the finite element method. The performance of tire chips-filled trench barriers predicted using FE analysis is also compared with the performance of other common infill materials such as sawdust and geofoam. Numerical studies show that the vibration isolation efficiency and their performance are highly sensitive to the shear wave velocity of the soil and infill material density for infill trenches. The key findings of the study suggest that shredded tire chips can also be used as an infill material in trenches for reducing ground-borne vibrations, and its performance is comparable with geofoam-filled trenches.