The Applicability Of Reinforcing The Subgrade With Geosynthetics: Al-Nasiriya Roadways Soil As A Case Study

Abstract

The roads in AL-Nasiriya are heavily damaged by rutting distortion and most of them become out of service even though they are constructed from a very short period of time. Although, strengthening weak subgrade strata with geosynthetics is increasingly employed as a beneficial solution worldwide because of providing a required resistance against rutting. The potential of using such treatment for AL-Nasiriya roads is practically still limited as the full behavior of the composite geocell-soil does not understood until now. In this paper, experimental, theoretical, and analytical evaluations have been presented on reinforcing natural weak subgrade collected from AL-Nasiriya city by three types of geo-materials for offer an evaluation to the treatment in enhancing the roads efficiency and performance. The laboratory work included three main series. The first series included conventional tests to identify the used material. The second series represents a group of socked CBR tests for different cases of geo-materials reinforcement. The third series is dealt with wheel tracker test to assess the reduction in rutting resulted from the reinforcement with geofabrics. The theoretical evaluation is performed using Spactra Pave software to compute the saving in cost achieved by this treatment. Moreover, an analytical procedure is followed to evaluate the pavement performance with geo-synthetics from three prospective; traffic benefit ratio, extended life of the pavement, and base coarse reduction factor. Outcomes demonstrate the geo-synthetics efficiently in improving Al-Nasiriyah weak soil.