Using tire derived aggregates (TDA) as infill material for wave barriers

Abstract

Ground-borne vibrations caused by construction activities and highway and railway traffic may disturb adjacent structures and sensitive machines. Thus, studies on isolating this type of vibrations have accelerated in recent years. Few experimental work investigated the use of rubber-soil mixtures as infill material for vibration mitigation. However, despite its high damping capacity, almost no experimental work has been conducted to evaluate the use of Tire Derived Aggregates (TDA) as infill material for trench barriers. This paper aims to investigate the use of TDA trenches as a wave barrier. Also, the performance of buried TDA trenches was considered in this work. A series of vibration tests were conducted in a steel tank with dimensions of 2.75 m long, 2.25 m wide, and 1.80 m deep. The trench depth and frequency varied from 0.2 to 0.6 m and 100–200 Hz, respectively. The results showed that TDA trenches had a superior performance compared to open trenches. TDA trenches could reduce the vertical vibration amplitude by up to 30 % more than open trenches. Also, open and TDA trenches performed better in mitigating the vertical vibrations compared to the other directions. Furthermore, for optimum design of open and TDA trenches, the normalized trench depth should be between 1 and 1.3 D. Covering TDA trenches with soil was found to decrease their vibration isolation significantly at normalized burial depth larger than 0.15.