Practical approach to predict the shear strength of fibre-reinforced clay

Carpet waste fibres have a higher volume to weight ratio and once discarded into landfills, these fibres occupy a larger volume than other materials of similar weight. This research evaluates the efficiency of two types of carpet waste fibre as sustainable soil reinforcing materials to improve the shear strength of clay. A series of consolidated undrained (CU) triaxial compression tests were carried out to study the shear strength of reinforced clays with 1% to 5% carpet waste fibres. The results indicated that carpet waste fibres significantly improve the effective shear stress ratio and deviator stress of the host soil. Addition of 1%, 3% and 5% carpet fibres could improve the effective shear stress ratio of the unreinforced soil by 17.6%, 53.5% and 70.6%, respectively at an initial effective consolidation stress of 200 kPa. In this study, a nonlinear regression model was developed based on a modified form of the hyperbolic model to predict the relationship between effective shear stress ratio, deviator stress and axial strain of fibre-reinforced soil samples with various fibre contents when subjected to various initial effective consolidation stresses. The proposed model was validated using the published experimental data, with predictions using this model found to be in excellent agreement.