• Geomechanics and Engineering
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• v.17 no.1
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• pp.81-95
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• 2019

Due to the importance of soil reinforcement using geotextiles in geotechnical engineering, study and investigation into long-term performance, design life and survivability of geotextiles, especially due to installation damage are necessary and will affect their economy. During installation, spreading and compaction of backfill materials, geotextiles may encounter severe stresses which can be higher than they will experience in-service. This paper aims to investigate the installation damage of geotextiles, in order to obtain a good approach to the estimation of the material's strength reduction factor. A series of full-scale tests were conducted to simulate the installation process. The study includes four deliberately poorly-graded backfill materials, two kinds of subgrades with different CBR values, three nonwoven needle-punched geotextiles of classes 1, 2 and 3 (according to AASHTO M288-08) and two different relative densities for the backfill materials. Also, to determine how well or how poorly the geotextiles tolerated the imposed construction stresses, grab tensile tests and visual inspections were carried out on geotextile specimens (before and after installation). Visual inspections of the geotextiles revealed sedimentation of fine-grained particles in all specimens and local stretching of geotextiles by larger soil particles which exerted some damage. A regression model is proposed to reliably predict the installation damage reduction factor. The results, obtained by grab tensile tests and via the proposed models, indicated that the strength reduction factor due to installation damage was reduced as the median grain size and relative density of the backfill decreases, stress transferred to the geotextiles' level decreases and as the as-received grab tensile strength of geotextile and the subgrades' CBR value increase.