Geosynthetic Applications for Mitigation of Natural Disasters Caused by Climate Change

Great attention is directed to rebuild livelihoods and rehabilitate coastal communities affected by the Tsunami in the Indian Ocean in South Asia. From the geotechnical engineering point of view, the natural disasters caused by tsunami is quite similar to the devastating effects of strong storms, typhoons, and hurricanes. Geosynthetics can play important and vital roles in the protection, mitigation and rehabilitation efforts in affected coastal areas. Geosynthetics can be applied for reinforcement, filtration, drainage, protection, lining, and containment. Particularly, geotextiles can be used effectively for erosion protection and for reinforcement of earth embankments to resist failure during the occurrence of earthquakes associated with tsunami. Presented in this paper is the interaction behavior at pullout interfaces of high strength geotextile confined in weathered clay and silty sand. The interface parameters have been successfully interpreted by the newly proposed method considering the softening behavior and non-uniform distribution of shear stress along the extensible reinforcement. Furthermore, the mobilized strain in the geotextile reinforcement at the intersection of the reinforcement and the slip failure surface has been back-analyzed to consist of the critical strain and the localized strain. The critical strain occurred at the onset of plastic deformation of the soft clay foundation. The localized strain, which occurred at the onset of embankment collapse, can be estimated using a new method based on the in-soil stiffness and inclination factors of the reinforcement.