Geotextile as Highway Reinforcement

Geotextile is a man-made technology that has been widely used to improve the quality of road construction, including geotextile highway reinforcement. Geotextile is one of the most widely used geosynthetic materials. It looks like an ordinary textile and consists of synthetic fibers that are flexible and free from the shrinkage problems of natural fiber materials such as wool, cotton or
silk.

Reinforcing soft soil with conventional filling without a geotextile layer on the subgrade requires a much higher embankment than using geotextile as subgrade reinforcement. With geotextile, the thickness of the fill layer that serves as the road subgrade becomes smaller.

To design the embankment height and soil reinforcement for a highway project, you need to know the general characteristics and properties of the soil at the project site. This is done through field tests and laboratory tests. To obtain data on soil characteristics at the project site, a soil investigation consisting of cone penetration (sondir) tests and boring can be carried out. For calculating subgrade bearing capacity, the field test can be done by boring.

The purpose of the boring test is to identify the soil type visually and to obtain the soil layer profile at each depth. In this design analysis, the soil data considered most critical is used.