Dynamic Response of Sand Reinforced with Randomly Distributed Fibers

Evaluation on Failure of Fiber-Reinforced Sand

“…In line with previous studies (Gray and Ohashi 1983;Maher and Gray 1990;Zornberg 2002;Diambra et al 2010), it is assumed that the shear strength of a fiber-reinforced soil is jointly attributed to by two parts, one from the host soil and the other by the fiber reinforcement. Furthermore, it is assumed that the anisotropy of the host soil is regarded as negligible compared with that induced by the reinforcing fibers, such that the host soil can be considered to be isotropic, while the reinforcing fibers dominate the anisotropic behavior of the composite strength.…”

“…1. The fiber concentration can also be described by the ratio between the weight of the fibers and that of the total composite soil (Maher and Gray 1990). Fiber distribution tensor F ij defined in Eq.…”

“…(2) The failure curve for the fiber-reinforced soil approaches a straight line with a slope of M c at high effective confinement. At high effective confinement, the failure of the composite is expected to be mainly governed by either the yielding of the fiber (strong and thick fibers) or by fiber breaking (weak or very thin fibers) (Maher and Gray 1990;Consoli et al 2007c;Michalowski 2008;Silva Dos Santos et al 2010). In either of the two cases, the fiber reinforcement would reach a maximum/limit, which renders the failure envelopes for the reinforced and unreinforced soils parallel to each other at high confining pressure.…”

“…A simple bilinear relationship has been employed by Maher and Gray (1990) and Zornberg (2002) to describe the failure behavior of fiber-reinforced soil, wherein the two line segments intersect with each other at the critical confining/normal stress. Michalowski and Cermák (2003) considered various mechanisms of work dissipation at low and high confining pressures and proposed a criterion with a straight segment when the confining stress is below the critical confining stress and a curved one when it is above the critical confining stress.…”

“…In modeling the failure of fiber-reinforced soils, traditional approaches assume that the fiber orientation in the soil is random (Maher and Gray 1990;Zornberg 2002;Michalowski and Zhao 1996;Michalowski and Cermák 2003;Ranjan et al 1996), while the real shear behavior of fiber-reinforced soil depends typically on the loading direction largely as a result of anisotropic fiber orientation. Traditional models apparently lead to inadequate characterization of the soil behavior.…”