Investigating the strength characteristics of tyre chips sand mixtures for geo-cellular structure engineering

Waste tyres are more and more widely used in geotechnical applications as backfill material in substitution or in combination with natural soils. Beyond the economical and environmental concerns, these materials can help solving problems with low shear strength soils. In a first part, the study aims at investigating the mechanical behaviour of tyre chip sand mixtures thanks to triaxial tests. Two factors were studied (i) the tyre chip content, from 0 to 100 % by mass and (ii) the orientation of the pieces of tyre, with four varying orientation conditions. In a second part, the presentation will describe the feasibility of using tyre chip-sand mixture as a fill material in cellular structures (gabion technique) for potential civil engineering application. This investigation is part of a large study engaged in an innovative development aiming at con-structing the front face, the core and possibly the back face of reinforced structure using gabion technique. Analysis of the mechanical behaviour of the gabion cells filled with geocomposite material, i.e. tyre-sand mixtures, will be presented. Particular interest is placed on the deforma-tion of the cell in comparison with traditional stone filled gabion cells. It is expected that the proposed tyre-sand mixture will hav