Assessing the potential reuse of recycled glass fibre in problematic soil applications

Global environmental consciousness and high disposal cost of glass wastes have influenced the potential use of recycled glass fibres (RGF). The characteristic strength of RGF can be improved and therefore reuse especially in construction industry appropriate to its intended purpose. In this paper, series of experiments were conducted to investigate the mechanical properties of RGF derived from electronic grade glass (E-glass) scraps. The effect of the RGF inclusion in soil strength parameter improvement was also studied by considering different types of soil media, vertical pressures and coating effect. The results show that the mechanical properties of RGF are slightly lower than the original fibres. However, in the presence of acrylonitrile butadiene styrene (ABS) coating, the interfacial friction between soil particles and fibres surface is increased due to the increase in their surface area of contact thus, improving both cohesion value and the angle of internal friction values of the reinforced soil. Likewise, failure envelopes of various soil media reinforced with RGF were observed to be enhanced significantly. The findings from this research show that the presence of RGF reinforcement in reinforced soil leads to a significant increase in the shearing resistance and internal friction angles of soil media. Furthermore, soil fibre matrix deformation is fairly retained, as a result of interlocking action between soil and glass fibres which mobilises the resistance to horizontal shearing stresses. (C) 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.