Bearing capacity and settlement of tire-reinforced sands

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This paper presents the beneficial use of waste tires as reinforcing material in sand from laboratory plate load tests. Treads and sidewalls of tires were combined to make the tire mat. Plate load tests were conducted to study the reinforcing effect under various conditions such as relative density, embedded depth, number of reinforced layers, size of a mat and combination type of tire segments. From the plate load test results, the effectiveness of tire mat as a reinforcing material could clearly be seen. The effects of reinforcing and settlement reduction are higher at lower sand density. The reinforced sand’s bearing capacity is more than twice that of unreinforced sand. The effects were more pronounced at a cover depth of less than 0.4 B. The reinforcement of single layer in medium density sand was enough to reduce the settlement more than half and increase bearing capacity more than a factor of two. The combinations of both treads and sidewalls resulted in the highest bearing capacity. The bearing capacity increased steadily as the width of the mat increased up to five times the plate width and converged at just over twice the bearing capacity of unreinforced sand and remained constant thereafter.