Experimental investigation of behavior of cement treated geotextile reinforced base layer under cyclic loads

In this study, the use of geotextile and cement-treated geotextile as reinforcement elements of the base layer and as separation elements at the interface of the base and subgrade soil were investigated by large-scale experiments and numerical analyses under cyclic loads. In addition, the effects of geotextile and cemented geotextile on the bearing capacity were examined by small scale experiments under static loads in terms of load displacement behavior. Repeated loading results obtained from the study were evaluated in terms of total deformation, permanent deformation, elastic deformation, percentage of change in elastic deformation, resilient modulus (MR), traffic benefit ratio (TBR), rut depth reduction ratio (RDR), and improvement factor (If). When the results of the experiments were evaluated, the soils reinforced with geotextile and cemented geotextile performed better than the unreinforced soils. In addition, the soil reinforced with cemented geotextile performed better than the soil reinforced with geotextile. When the case where cemented geotextile was used both as a base layer reinforcement element and as an interface separation element was compared with the case where the base layer was not reinforced and geotextile was used as an interface separation element, the RDR value at the end of 5000 load cycles was 49.26%, the improvement factor was approximately 2 and the TBR value at 27 mm permanent deformation was 14.62. Experimental and numerical analysis results were determined to be consistent.