Abstract

During the last decades, the rising demand for land reclamation and the utilization of soft or unstable soils led to a great advance in the ground amelioration techniques as a major part of civil engineering around the world. Within this framework, this paper presents the results of an experimental program based mainly on direct shear tests on sand generated from aggregate industry, with and without waste polypropylene (PP) fibre reinforcement, in order to assess the effect of randomly distributed PP fibre on the stress displacement behaviour and shearing strength of this type of sand. The effects of the variation of PP fibre content (limited to 1.5% of the weight of sand) and length (0.5, 1 and 1.5 cm) are investigated. The obtained test results indicate that PP fibre reinforcement increases the maximum shear constraint and changes the sands brittle mechanical behaviour into a more ductile one. These results pave the way to an effective valorisation of such a traditionally useless kind of sand.

Key words: Polypropylene fibres, fibre-reinforced sand, shearing strength, mechanical behaviour.