Soil-geotextile pull-out interaction properties: testing and interpretation

This paper presents a soil-reinforcement load transfer model and a procedure for interpreting pull-out tests on extensible reinforcements. The model combines the constitutive equation of the reinforcement with interaction laws relating the shear stress mobilized at any point of the interface to the soil-reinforcement shear displacement. The main conclusions are; extensibility has a major effect on soil-reinforcement interaction; for extensible reinforcement, extrapolation of pull-out test results to reinforcement of different dimensions requires a careful evaluation of the scale effect; and a meaningful interpretation of pull-out test results on geotextiles and geogrids requires an adequate estimation of the in-soil confined properties of the reinforcement and an appropriate soil-geotextile interaction law.