Strength Behavior of Fine Grained Soil Reinforced with Randomly Distributed Polypropylene Fibers

Admixtures and reinforcement materials are frequently used in practice to stabilize coarse and fine grained soils and to improve their engineering properties. However, a limited number of studies have been carried out on fiber-reinforced fine grained soils. In this study, a series of unconfined compression tests, direct shear tests, and California Bearing Ratio tests were carried out to investigate the effect of randomly distributed polypropylene fiber on the strength behavior of a fine grained soil. The content of polypropylene fiber was varied between 0.25 and 1% by total dry weight of the reinforced samples. It was observed that unconfined compression strength, cohesion intercept and California Bearing Ratio increased with the addition of fibers. On the other hand, the results of the tests indicated that shear strength angle was not affected significantly by the fiber reinforcement.