Physical Model Study of the Seismic Performance of Highway Embankments with and without Geotextile

In order to ensure structural safety and integrity in earthquake conditions, it may be useful or even necessary to increase the seismic safety of the highway embankments with reinforcement inclusions. The inclusion of geosynthetics in highway embankments may provide an additional tensile strength and durability to construct more stable and earthquake resistant embankments. In this study, the contributions of the primary factors as inclusion of the geotextile reinforcement, slope inclination and dynamic motion characteristics affecting the seismic performance of the highway embankments are evaluated. Shake table models of the unreinforced and geosynthetic reinforced highway embankments with different slope inclinations are designed. An extensive series of shake table tests were performed under dynamic motions with different predominant frequencies. Test results revealed that inclusion of geotextiles in the embankment model causes deamplification of the transmitted accelerations traveling through the reinforced embankment models. Thus, the geosynthetic reinforcement successfully enhances the seismic performance and mitigates earthquake-related hazards. Contribution of this study to the literature is that the efficiency of the geosynthetic reinforcement by means of energy absorption properties is highly dependent on the dynamic motion characteristics but less dependent to the degree of slope inclination.