The behaviour of containment bund using stacked geotextile tubes filled with lightly cemented soft soil

Abstract

This land reclamation project used stacked geotextile tubes to construct a 1 km long containment bund. In the past, sand is the preferred infilling material of geotextile tubes due to its ease of construction. However, due to sand scarcity in Singapore, soft soil becomes a potential alternative infilling material. One of the challenges of using soft soil as infilling material is that there will be an excessive settlement and concerns about the overall stability of the stacked tubes. Hence, the soft soil is lightly cemented before infilling into the geotextile tubes. This paper presents the design consideration and the construction sequence of the construction of a stacked geotextile tubes containment bund. Extensive instrumentation was installed at a section of the containment bund to study the behaviour of this geotextile tube. The instrumentation includes strain gauges, pore pressure transducer and total pressure cell. After two years of construction was completed, Standard Penetration Test (SPT) and laboratory triaxial test were used to evaluate the strength of the infilling material. All the instrument data and strength tests results were used to ascertain the performance of the stacked geotextile tubes containment bund.