Abstract
Geosynthetic reinforcements may be damaged during its installation in the filed. The installation damage mainly depends on two factors such as materials used and construction activities. This paper describes the results of a series of field tests, which are conducted to assess the installation damage of geogrid according to different maximum grain sizes of fills (40, 60, and 80 mm). These tests are done in three sites for twelve different kinds of geogrids. After field tests, the changes in tensile strength of the geogrids is determined from wide width tensile tests using both damaged and undamaged specimens. In the results of tests, tensile strength of the relatively flexible geogrids after field installation tests was decreased about from 20% to 40% according to the increment of the maximum grain size. On the other hand, for the relatively stiff geogrids, the loss of the tensile strength after site installation was examined below 5.2% independent of the maximum grain size of the soils. The results of this study show that the installation damage significantly depends on the stiffness of geogrid and is more obvious to a flexible geogrid and a fill material having higher maximum grain size.
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