| Resumo : |
The inclusion of materials into soil has long been used to improve its resistance properties, allowing the final structure to support larger loads or even a lesser amount of material to be used, which saves resources and therefore reduces the total cost of a determined work. The design of such structures is closely related to the interface properties between the soil and the included materials, thus it is necessary to understand the interaction among these materials in order to carry out a safe and cost-effective design. Many factors that influence this mechanism, including soils, reinforcement materials, and spacing between layers. Few studies were made considering the effect of a reinforcement layer in the adjacent ones, being one of them developed by Mohamed (2017), who performed an extensive testing program to evaluate the effects of several aspects on soil-reinforcement interaction, considering an actively loaded reinforcement and its effects on two passive neighboring layers. The purpose of this work is to extrapolate the laboratory results with the aid of Finite Element Method, analyzing the stress distribution into the soil mass and how it changes during pullout progression. Different configurations are assessed, varying reinforcement materials and spacing between layers. Firstly, the displacements calculated by the computational models are compared to the measured displacements, being noticed that the FEM model reproduced the geotextile tests satisfactorily, however the same did not occur for the geogrid test. Next, stress distribution is evaluated, being observed the clear influence of the interface properties and the presence of passive reinforcements in the stress distribution, besides the similarity between horizontal and shear stress distributions for all simulations. Finally, an additional discussion is made considering the influence of the box height, with no variation being observed in pullout resistance, active reinforcement displacements, and shear stress distribution, but being verified that in soil displacements, passive reinforcements displacements, and effective horizontal and vertical stress distributions, box height has greater impact than interlayer spacing. |