Boundary element analysis of reinforced soil systems using geotextiles

Among the problems that highway constructors have to consider are the rutting of temporary roads and crack propagations in the subsoil when concrete blocks are used as a roadbase. Geotextiles have been used to overcome these difficulties, but relatively little theoretical work has been undertaken towards understanding of the mechanisms by which the geotextile supports the pavement. In this paper, a numerical model to analyse the interaction of soil-geotextile systems is presented. The method used a coupled formulation of the boundary element method (BEM) and a set of discrete spring elements. A two dimensional BEM incorporating the subregioning technique was used to represent the layered soils. The geotextile was represented by a set of fabric and interface elements. The fabric element models the reinforcing tensile strength of the geotextile and the interface elements, represented by a set of orthogonal springs, model the bonding and the shear between the membrane and the adjacent layers. To model the deformed shape of the system, an incremental loading procedure was used to take account of the geometric non-linearity of the problem. Copyright (C) 1996 Elsevier Science Ltd