Amin Keshavarz

Soil-reinforcement interaction consists of three factors including frictional resistance, shear strength of the soil and passive resistance. In the ordinary polymeric strap (PS) reinforcement, only frictional resistance contributes to pullout resistance. In this study, in order to develop passive resistance in the soil, a number of angles as transversal elements were attached to PS reinforcement, which is called bearing polymeric strap (BPS). The post-cyclic pullout behaviour of the BPS is evaluated using a large-scale pullout apparatus adopting multistage pullout (MSP) test and one-stage pullout (OSP) test procedures. The results show that a spacing-to-high ratio of angles equal to 3.33 gives the maximum pullout resistance. MSP tests were performed on the BPS with an optimum arrangement to evaluate the influence of various factors including cyclic tensile load amplitude, load frequency and number of load cycles, and also the influence of vertical effective stress on the pullout resistance and the peak apparent coefficient of friction mobilized at the soil-BPS interface. Moreover, for BPS system with a single isolated transverse member, the bearing capacity factor Nq was calculated using equations based on three failure modes and it was found that the Nq calculated in the punching shear failure mode makes the best prediction.