STUDY OF THE DYNAMIC BEHAVIOR OF FINE SOIL REINFORCED WITH RECYCLED POLYETHYLENE TEREPHTHALATE (PET) FIBER

Abstract

ABSTRACT: PET occupies a preponderant place in plastic waste in Mexico, in the last six years the post-consumer stockpiling of PET has been the highest in America and during 2017 its recovery increased by 20,000 tons per year, their increase reached 445,000 tons per year [1]. In this way, one of the alternatives to recycling PET is produce fibers to reinforce fine soils of low shear strength and high deformation like Mexico’s city soil. For this particular case, Mexico City’s soil is notorious for its high plasticity, low strength, high compressibility and cracking tendency. Due to these, the strongest earthquakes have shown the brutal amplification and the substantial increase in the duration of the movements. In order to seek new alternatives for soil improvement in the Valley of Mexico, this study investigates the dynamic behavior of a high plasticity silty soil extracted from the former Texcoco Lake, reinforced with different PET fiber contents. The results indicate that there is a significant modification in the dynamic parameters of the soil due to fiber inclusion, an increase in the maximum elastic shear stiffness of the soil and a significant decrease in deformation for a fiber content of 0.3% at all confining pressures, this can be useful in the construction by improving the properties of this type of soil for geotechnical works through the inclusion of synthetic fibers, the large-scale use of stone materials from loan banks for stabilizing soil can be reduced, which will also avoid requiring reinforcement geosynthetics made of new materials. According to the results obtained in this research it was developed some applications and a general construction method for geotechnical works Key Words: Fiber-reinforcement, Soil stabilization, Seismic engineering, Unsaturated soils, Geosynthetics.