Geotechnical performance of waste tires for soil reinforcement from chamber tests

This paper presents reinforcing effects of the newly devised ‘Tirecell’, made from treads of waste tires, in sand. Parametric studies of the number of connection bolts between Tirecells, relative density of sand, embedded depth, the number of reinforced layers, and the width of Tirecell were performed by using plate load tests. The number of connection bolts used was enough to maintain the given pressure. Both the bearing capacity increased and the settlement reduction was the highest at the lowest density of sand, and the reinforcing effect of sand was obtained when the embedded depth was within 1.0 B, where B is the loading width. Higher bearing capacity was achieved by adding the Tirecell-reinforcement layers within 1.0 B. Especially, the bearing capacity increased remarkably at one layer of the reinforcement, and the degree of increase was small from one-layer reinforcement to two layers. The Tirecell width that did not change the bearing capacity was smaller than that of geocell because of the high stiffness of the Tirecell. The reinforcing effect of Tirecell, in general, was more prominent than that of a commercial geocell.