Abstract
This paper presents a series of unconsolidated-undrained (UU) triaxial compression tests for investigating the behavior and failure mechanism of geotextile-reinforced clay and the effects of sandwiching nonwoven geotextile in a thin layer of sand (sandwich technique) on improving the shear strength of reinforced clay. Test variables include confining pressures, the number of geotextile layers, and thicknesses of the sand layers. The mobilized tensile strain of reinforcements, estimated according to the residual tensile strain by using a digital image–processing technique, was used to directly quantify the effects of soil-geotextile interaction on the shear-strength improvement. The test results showed that the shear strength of reinforced clay increased as the number of geotextile layers was increased. Failure patterns were changed from classical Rankine-type failures for unreinforced soil specimens to bulging (barrel-shaped) failures between adjacent geotextile layers. The effectiveness of reinf...

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