COMPARISON OF SHEAR

STRENGTH OF SOIL USING

GEOGRID & GEOTEXTILES

Under the guidance of:

Prof. J. P. Sahoo,
Department of Civil Engineering ,
IIT, Roorkee
Submitted by:
Pushpendra Saini(13113086)
Raj Shekhar(13113089)
Rajjak Kathat (13113092)
Ramnivas Kushwaha(13113093)
Sanjay Kumar(13113098)

Acknowledgment
It is indeed pleasure and a moment of satisfaction for
us to express our gratitude and sincere thanks to our
project guide Prof. J. P. Sahoo, Department of

Civil Engineering , Indian Institute of

Technology, Roorkee, who have been constant
source of inspiration, guidance and encouragement.
We also express our sincere thanks to all other faculty
members of geotechnical discipline of our department
for their support and enlightenment throughout this
journey. We are privileged to experience a sustained
enthusiastic and involved interest from their side.
We are also thankful to lab technicians of our
geotechnical laboratory who provided us the technical
support to carry out the project work.

ABSTRACT
Soil-geosynthetic interaction parameters play important
role for design and performance of reinforced soil
structures.
Due to the low bearing capacity of soils in places that
because of economic, military or geological conditions
engineers are oblige to build a structure on,
geosynthetics will be used to reinforce the soil and
improve its bearing capacity. Particularly, A good
example is roadways, where geosynthetics are placed
between the interface of the granular materials and the
soft-soil sub-grade to improve the bearing capacity of
the composite layers. In this project the behaviour of
soils that were reinforced with different kinds of
geosynthetics were studied by conducting experiments
in the laboratory.
In this report the behaviour of sandy soil reinforced with
geotextiles and geogrid are investigated. Large-scale
direct shear tests were performed on unreinforced and
reinforced samples with different geosynthetics. The
results show that depending on the characteristics of
the geosynthetics, the inclusion of these materials has
been found to increase the shear strength parameters
of soils. It implies that the geosynthetic- -reinforced
soils in the sub-base layer of roads are so sensitive to
the characteristics of geosynthetics and will perform
better than non-reinforced soils and consequently the
load-carrying capacity of the basement will improve
only if the appropriate geosynthetics are used.

Keywords:

Sand,
Strength parameters.

Geotextiles,

Geogrid,

Shear

CONTENTS
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.

Introduction
Methodology
Results & Discussions
Conclusions
References

INTRODUCTION
1.1 The use of geosynthetic as reinforcement material
in soils for improvement of the performance of retaining
walls, foundations and slopes etc. has received
considerable attention. Geosynthetic inclusions within a
soil mass can provide a reinforcement function by
developing tensile forces which contribute to the
stability of the reinforced soil structure.
Geosynthetic products typically used as reinforcement
elements are nonwoven geotextiles, woven geotextiles,
geogrids, and geocells. Reinforced soil vertical walls
generally provide vertical grade separations at a lower
cost than traditional concrete walls. Reinforced wall
systems involve the use of shotcrete facing protection
or of facing elements such as precast or cast-in-place
concrete panels. Alternatively, steepened reinforced
slopes may eliminate the use of facing elements, thus
saving material costs and construction time in relation
to vertical reinforced walls. A reinforced soil system
generally provides an optimized alternative for the
design of earth retaining structures.
Design and construction of stable slopes and retaining
structures within space constrains are aspects of major
economic significance in Geotechnical Engineering
projects. For example, when geometry requirements
dictate changes of elevation in a highway project, the
engineer faces a variety of distinct alternatives for
designing the required earth structures. Traditional
solutions have been either a concrete retaining wall or
a conventional, relatively flat, unreinforced slope.
Although simple to design, concrete wall alternatives
have generally led to elevated construction and

material costs. On the other hand, the construction of

unreinforced embankments with flat slope angles
dictated by stability considerations is an alternative
often precluded in projects where design is controlled
by space constraints.
The use of inclusions to improve the mechanical
properties of soils dates to ancient times. Moreover, its
acceptance has also been triggered by a number of
technical factors that include aesthetics, reliability,
simple
construction
techniques,
good
seismic
performance, and the ability to tolerate large
deformations without structural distress. The design of
reinforced soil slopes is based on the use of limit
equilibrium methods to evaluate both external (global)
and internal stability of the structure. The required
tensile strength of the reinforcements is selected during
design so that the margins of safety, considering an
internal failure are adequate.
A reduced scale geotextile-reinforced slope model built
using dry sand a backfill material. The maximum slope
inclination of an unreinforced sand under its own
weight is the angle of repose of the sand, which is well
below the inclination of the slope face of the model.
Horizontal geotextile reinforcements placed within the
backfill provided stability to the steep sand slope.

1.2 Literature Review:

The reinforced earth consists of a combination of earth
and reinforcing elements. The reinforcement is often a
linear element of a layer placed between the soil layers
to enable them to withstand higher stress and to
improve the basic properties of the foundation material.
The soil exhibit low tensile strength tending to a

negligible value in the case of granular soils. In soil, the

internal stresses developed due to load application
generates the frictional forces between the soil and the
reinforcing material and transfers the stresses to
reinforcing elements due to friction between the two
materials.
Since the beginning of civilization, man has attempted
to use soil with some other materials to enable it for
being used for his necessities. Typical uses include use
of branches of trees etc. to support tracks over marshy
land to build hutments and to support large structures.
In villages mud plaster using rice puska is a popular
technique to strengthen the soil. Reinforced soil was
used by Babylonians more than 3000 years ago to build
ziggurats with woven mats of reeds. These have also
been used in parts of the Great Wall of China built
about 2000 years ago. The Dutch and Romans used
willow to reinforce dives and animal hides. The recent
discovery of methods of preparing high- modulus
polymer materials by tensile drawing, in a sense cold
working has raised the possibility of using such
materials as reinforcement in number of civil
engineering applications.
Today the major function of such geogrids is in the area
of the reinforcement. The key features of the geogrids
is that the opening 7 between longitudinal and
transverse ribs , called the apertures , are large
enough to allow the soil strike through from one side of
the geogrid to the other. The ribs of the geogrids are
quite stiff compared to the fibers of the geotextiles.
Also not only rib strength is important but junction
strength is also important. The reason for this is that
the soil strike-through within the apertures bears

against the transverse ribs, which transmit their loads

to the longitudinal ribs via the junctions. The junction is
the location where the longitudinal and transverse ribs
are connected. The original geogrids were first made in
the United Kingdom by Netlon, Ltd. And were brought in
1982 to the U.S.by the way of Canada by the Tensar
Corp. A similar product by Tenax Corporation is also
available. Textile material was perhaps first used in
road construction in South Carolina in the early 1930s.
The first use of a woven synthetic fabric for erosion
control was in 1950s in Florida by Barett. In 1960s
geotextile were extensively used for erosion control
both in Europe as well as U.S.A. later in 1969, Giroud
used non-woven fabrics as a filter in the upstream face
of an earthen dam. In 1971 Wager initiated use of
woven fabrics as reinforcement for embankments
constructed on very soft foundations. The term
Reinforced Earth was used after a French engineer
Henry Vidal, who invented this technique. Once while
walking across a dry sandy beach, he noticed that
mounds of dry sand could be made to stand at a
steeper angle after the addition of horizontal layers of
pine needles. In modem days, the success of the
geotextile depends on synthetic fibres, which are
resistant to degradation by the micro-organisms
present in the soil. Although even today some fabrics
made from natural fibers such as jute, coir etc. are also
being used.

1.3 Scope and Objective of the work:

Soil improvement in its broadest sense is the alteration
of any property of a soil to improve its engineering
performance. This may be either a temporary process

to permit the construction of a facility or may be a

permanent measure to improve the performance of the
completed facility. The result of an application of a
technique may be increased strength and reduced
compressibility.
There are various techniques of soil improvement.
Some of them are removal and replacement, Precompression, vertical drains, reinforcement and many
more.
Soil is stronger in compression than in tension. To
improve strength of soil in tension we provide
geotextile in soil for soil reinforcement.
In our project we have performed Large Direct Shear
Test on Soil Reinforced with different types of
geotextiles and geogrid then we have compared the
results.

METHODOLOGY
2.1

The size of the shearing device can influence the

direct shear test results. Generally, the boundary effect
and device friction are more significant for a smaller
shear box. Ingold (1982) conducted laboratory directshear tests of the soil/geotextile interface by using
different sizes of shear boxes. The dimension of the
shear box, (ASTM 2002), with minimum dimensions of
five times the maximum opening size (in plan) of the
geosynthetic being tested, should be used in the direct
shear test of the geosynthetic/soil interface.
In this test a large-scale direct shear device was used,
which has length, width, and thickness of 310mm
315mm 130mm. The vertical loading applied by a
hydraulic jack is transferred through the rigid reaction
frame and adds on a rigid load plate that is placed on
top of the soils in the upper shear box. The normal load
is constant during the test, satisfying the requirement
regulated by ASTM D5321 (ASTM 2002). A rigid plate is
conventionally used as the loading plate in direct-shear
tests. The system is capable of applying a vertical force
and a shear force of up to 50 kN. Fig. 1.1 shows a
frontal view of the large-scale direct-shear device used
in this study. The vertical force applied on the rigid
plate. The horizontal movement of the upper shear box
and the shear force exerted during the shearing testing
are recorded. These data are collected by using two
load cells and two linear variable displacement.

Fig. 1.1: Large direct shear test set-up

2.2 Method:
The soil used for the large scale direct shear testing
program is prepared by compacting the initially
prepared soil to the target unit weight within the shear
box. The soil is compacted in three layers.
The compaction of sand is manually done by rammer.
The geosynthetic specimen is positioned on top of the
lower shear box. Then soil is put into the top box and it
is compacted.
Then Normal loading is applied on the specimen and
the vertical load on the test specimen is then
monitored. Shear loading is not applied until the
vertical deformation reaches its equilibrium. We apply

and increase the shear load gradually. After it reaches

equilibrium we measure the deformation in the upper
box using dial gauge.
The maximum shear strength during the shear process
is recorded as the peak shear strength. The direct shear
tests for soilsoil interfaces and soil/geotextile were
conducted under the same normal loading and same
testing procedures for the sake of comparison.

2.3 Grain size distribution:

This test is performed to classify the soil. In this test
sieves of different sizes were used. We take 100 grams
of sample and we sieve the sample manually. Then the
retained soil on sieves of various sizes was weighed.
GSD curve was plotted on semi-log graph between
particle size and percentage finer of soil less than a
particular size.

Graph 1.1: Grain size distribution curve

2.4 Materials:
2.4.1 Geotextile TS:
Geotextile, TS is a nonwoven Geotextile. Composed of
polypropylene fibre, which are formed into a stable
network such that the fibre retain their relative position.
Geotextile, TS is inert to illogical degradation and
resistant to naturally encountered chemicals, alkalis,
and acids. Geotextile, TS demonstrates high uniform
strength in all directions, which means there are no
inherently weak areas. Moreover, the continuous nature
of the bonded fibre makes unravelling or abrasion
under dynamic loads impossible.

2.4.2 Geotextile PP
PP geotextiles are made of artificial fibres with various
petro-chemical derivatives as their source. These
geotextiles are permeable fabrics which, when used in
association with soil, have the ability to separate, filter,
reinforce, protect or drain. Our products feature high
tensile strength and low elongation standards. These

have superior capacity for filtration and load

distribution, thus reducing rotting and helping in
extending the life of paved and unpaved roadways.
Table 1.1: Properties of geotextile
TYPE

TENSILE STRENGHT
(kN/m)

ELONGATION (%)

TS 70

25

100

PP 300

16

25-100

Fig. 1.2: Different types of geotextiles

2.4.3 Geogrid:
A geogrid is geosynthetic material used to reinforce
soils and similar materials. Geogrids are commonly
used to reinforce retaining walls, as well as subbases or
subsoils below roads or structures. Soils pull apart
under tension. Compared to soil, geogrids are strong in
tension. This fact allows them to transfer forces to a
larger area of soil than would otherwise be the case.

Fig. 1.3: Geogrid

2.3.4 Soil:
Loose sand was used as testing material. Properties of
soil obtained by various tests are given below:
Table 1.2: Soil properties

Uniformity Co-efficient

(Cu)

2.19

Co-efficient of Curvature (Cc)

Soil type

1.034
Poorly graded sand(SP)

Specific Gravity of grains (G)

2.65

Dry unit weight, d

18 kN/m3

RESULTS AND DISCUSSIONS

3.1

Stress vs strain curves for different normal load from 1 tonne to 3

tonne were plotted from the tests results of Large Direct Shear Test
performed on the sand and sand reinforced with different
geosynthetics. These plots are shown in Figs. - 1.3(a-c). And the
observations of shear stress and horizontal displacement is shown in
Table 1.4(a-c).
Table 1.4(a): Shear stress vs horizontal displacement (mm) for
normal load = 1 ton
Shear
stress(Mpa)
0.0000
0.0100
0.0201
0.0301
0.0401
0.0502
0.0602
0.0702
0.0803
0.0903

Unreinforce
d
0
0.485
1.2
2.56
4.965
8.365
22.465

Ts 70

Mix PP 300

Geogrid

0
0.155
1.24
2.09
3.025
4.79
6.885
9.035
11.765
19.54

0
0.2
0.685
1.58
3.13
4.46
6.155
8.965
20.165

0
0.17
0.585
1.66
2.45
3.86
5.78
9.33
18.85

Graph 1.3: (a) Shear stress vs Horizontal displacement (mm)

Table 1.4(b): Shear stress vs horizontal displacement (mm) for
normal load = 2 ton
Shear
stress(Mpa)
0.0000
0.0201
0.0401
0.0602
0.0803
0.1004
0.1204
0.1405

Unreinforce
d
0
0.885
1.35
2.115
3.3
5.905
8.01
13.3

Ts 70

Mix PP 300

Geogrid

0
0.345
1.315
3.065
5.08
7.535
10.885
15.52

0
0.265
0.87
1.97
3.77
5.47
8.725
12.95

0
0.255
0.76
1.785
4.02
6.97
12.175
21.005

Graph 1.3: (b) Shear stress vs Horizontal displacement (mm)

Table 1.4(c): Shear stress vs horizontal displacement (mm) for

normal load = 3 ton
Shear
stress(Mpa)
0.0000
0.0201
0.0401
0.0602
0.0803
0.1004
0.1204
0.1405
0.1606
0.1806
0.2007

Unreinforce
d
0
0.62
1.33
1.815
2.39
3.18
4.55
6.735
11.355

Ts 70

Mix PP 300

Geogrid

0
0.445
1.365
2.36
3.24
4.41
5.65
7.445
9.535
12.195
19.745

0
0.225
0.645
1.325
2.155
3.445
4.995
7.285
10.095
16.775

0
0.305
0.87
1.81
2.9
4.61
6.74
11.35
16.835

Graph 1.3: (c) Shear stress vs Horizontal displacement (mm)

3.2

The shear strength parameters (c and ) of reinforced and

unreinforced sand will be obtained from the graph - 1.2. And
observations of normal stress & shear stress are shown in Table 1.3.

Table 1.3: Shear stress vs Normal stress

Normal
stress(MPa)

Shear stress(MPa)
Unreinfored

Ts70

Mix PP 300

Geogrid

0.108065

0.053309

0.081353

0.076482

0.071160

0.209565

0.112651

0.135828

0.122797

0.121785

0.312334

0.150606

0.187972

0.182665

0.176381

Shear stress vs Normal stress

Unreinfored
Linear (Unreinfored)
Ts 70
Linear (Ts 70)
Mix PP 300
Linear (Mix PP 300)
Geogrid
Linear (Geogrid)

Graph 1.2: Shear stress vs Normal stress

3.3

Based on the results of large direct shear tests performed on

geogrid & geotextile reinforced sand & unreinforced sand shear
strength parameters obtained are shown in Table 1.5
Table 1.5: c & values for different soil conditions
Soil condition
Unreinforced
Reinforced with Ts 70
Reinforced with Mix
PP 300
Reinforced with
Geogrid

Equation
= 0.4761
0.0055
= 0.5218
0.0254
= 0.5199
0.0181
= 0.5151
0.0149

c
+

0.0055

(deg.)
25.46

0.0254

27.55

0.0181

27.47

0.0149

27.24

It is observed from Table - 1.5 that the shear strength parameters (c

and ) of reinforced sand increases with use of different geotextiles &
geogrid. Column 2, Column 3 and Column 4 of Table 1.5 shows the
equation of shear stress vs normal load, cohesion (c) and angle of
internal friction () for different soil conditions.
The cohesion component of shear strength of reinforced sand
Reinforced with Ts 70 is 0.0254 Mpa which indicates that there is a
substantial improvement in shear strength parameters of reinforced
sand. The significant increase in shear strength parameters of sand is
due to addition of geotextiles & geogrid sheets which improves the
load carrying capacity of sand. The reinforced sand can be used for
supporting the heavier loads of civil engineering structures.
The increase in shear strength parameters of reinforced sand is due to
the fact that inclusion of geosynthetics into sand improves its load
deformation behaviour by interacting with the sand particles
mechanically through surface friction and also by interlocking. The
function of bond or interlock is to transfer the stress from sand to the
geogrid sheet by mobilizing its tensile strength. Thus, geosynthetic
sheets works as frictional and tension resisting element. Further,
addition of geosynthetics makes the sand a composite material whose
strength and stiffness is greater than that of unreinforced sand.

CONCLUSIONS
A series of large-scale direct shear tests was conducted
to evaluate the sand-geogrid interface shear strength
using sand and a variety of geosynthetics. The main
conclusions that can be drawn from this investigation
are as follows:
Significant increase in cohesion (c) of the soil was
observed after using different geosynthetics with
soil sample in comparison with unreinforced soil.
There was not a significant increase in angle of
friction of reinforced & unreinforced soil.

 Values of shear strength parameters obtained by

using Geogrid were less as compared to those
obtained by using geotextiles.
In the two geotextiles used Ts 70 gives higher
values shear strength parameters as its tensile
strength was more then PP 300 as shown in Table
1.1
.

REFERENCES
H. P. Singh, EFFECTS OF GEOGRID SHEET ON
STRENGTH AND STIFFNESS OF LOOSE SAND
M. Kamalzare & R. Ziaie-Moayed, INFLUENCE OF
GEOSYNTHETIC REINFORCEMENT ON THE SHEAR
STRENGTH CHARACTERISTICS OF TWO-LAYER SUBGRADE

 Awdhesh K. C. & A. Murali Krishna, SOILGEOSYNTHETICS INTERACTION PROPERTIES FOR

DIFFERENT TYPES OF SOIL
Chia-Nan Liu, Yu-Hsien Ho, Jian-Wen Huang, Large scale
direct shear tests of soil/PET-yarn geogrid interfaces
Jorge
Gabriel
Zomberg,
PERFORMANCE
OF
GEOTEXTILE-REINFORCED SOIL STRUCTURES
Chia-Nan Liu1; Jorge G. Zornberg, Tsong-Chia Chen3,
Behavior of Geogrid-Sand Interface in Direct Shear Mode
Ennio M. Palmeira, Advances in Geosynthetics Materials
and Applications for Soil Reinforcement and Environmental