Innovative Geotechnical Repair Techniques - Effectiveness of Fibre Reinforced Soil

Work to evaluate the effectiveness of innovative geotechnical repair techniques for slopes has been commissioned by Highways England. The techniques are the planting of live willow poles, Fibre Reinforced Soil (FRS) and Electrokinetic Geosynthetics (EKG). These techniques were trialled to assess the overall impact of various challenges including environmental constraints (habitat and visual), access and utility constraints, and the need to reduce the scale and/or cost of traffic management and traffic delays. This report presents an assessment of the effectiveness of FRS as a long-term slope repair technique and is one of a series for this project. The addition of discrete randomly orientated fibres to improve the physical properties of soil is a technique that is more widely used in other countries such as the USA. The use of FRS has been reported to have benefits over other more commonly used slope repair techniques. In general, it allows the reuse of site-won aterial through the addition of a relatively small proportion of fibres to the soil fill.