Abstract

The waste tyre-derived products, including whole tyres, tyre bales, shreds, chips, and crumb rubber, have begun to be used in various geotechnical applications. In particular, the use of tyre bales in the construction of a lightweight embankment on the soft ground has the potential to satisfy the demand for low-cost materials exhibiting such beneficial properties. This paper presents the comparison between the common medium sand-filled embankment and two tyre-baled structures with various granular interlayers: medium sand and rubber aggregate. To assess the efficiency of tyre bale application in soft ground conditions, two subsoils were considered in the study: sandy clay and silty clay. The stability and settlement analysis of embankments, as well as subsoil bearing capacity checking, were performed for all structural cases. Bishop’s limit equilibrium slicing method and the finite element method were used in the embankment and subsoil analysis. The comprehensive testing of tyre bales and filling materials was also carried out to obtain the set of parameters used in both analyses. The comparison allowed qualitatively assessing the effectiveness of using waste tyre bales as a filling of road embankment when founded on soft ground. The analysis revealed that the application of tyre bales generally enhanced the embankment stability, effectively reduced the embankment settlement, and reduced the normal stress in the subsoil. In the tyre-baled embankments, the slip surface is located mostly within the embankment slope, showing good rotational stability, independent of subsoil conditions.

Highlights

  • Waste tyres are among the largest and most problematic sources of waste today

  • The stability and settlement analysis of a lightweight embankment filled with waste tyre bales and founded on the soft subsoil have been presented in the paper

  • Two lightweight embankments filled partially with the tyre-baled blocks consisting of the bales and granular interlayers have been compared with the common embankment constructed with medium sand only

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Summary

Introduction

Waste tyres are among the largest and most problematic sources of waste today. The waste tyre landfills constitute a significant burden for the natural environment: they burn for years and the smoke includes toxic chemicals. The waste tyre-derived products (TDP), including whole tyres, tyre bales, shreds, chips, and crumb rubber, have begun to be used in civil engineering applications, in various geotechnical solutions. The majority of these applications has addressed tyrederived aggregate (TDA), i.e. shreds, chips, and crumb rubber (Humphrey and Blumenthal 2010; Ahn et al 2015; Meles et al 2016a). The baling is nowadays the best way for the product recycling of waste tyres. It enables the reuse of the whole tyres with the possible use of low-energy processing

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