Behaviour of bamboo grid-reinforced soil bed

Abstract

ABSTRACT Soil reinforcement with bamboo is the oldest and the cheapest technique used to strengthen the bases for rural roads and low budget buildings. The easy availability of bamboo at low cost and eco-friendly nature proves that it is better than costly geosynthetic materials. Bamboo is a natural reinforcement material, manufactured by bamboo strips, and has been accepted as a substitute to geogrid for reinforcement applications, due to its tensile strength properties. An effective use of bamboo depends upon the configuration of mattresses. The bamboo grid reinforcement can have either a square opening or a hexagonal opening. The results of small-scale load tests on sand reinforced with the bamboo grid of different aperture shapes are presented in this paper. The two different aperture shapes used in the bamboo grid are hexagonal (tridirectional) and square (bidirectional) form. The parameters studied in this experimental investigation included the effects of the location of the top reinforcement layer, size of reinforcement, number of reinforcement layers and aperture shape of the bamboo grid. The test results indicate that the hexagonal aperture bamboo grid provides better performance than the square aperture bamboo grid. The improvement factors in bearing pressure and percentage reduction in the settlement ratio were found 4.3% and 81%, respectively, with the use of tridirectional bamboo grid reinforcement, while these parameters were obtained 3.0% and 68% for the bidirectional bamboo grid reinforcement at the settlement ratio of 7.5%.