Geotextile materials characteristics

Nonwovens are one of the fastest growing textile sectors with diverse applications. These applications have an extensive list, ranging from baby diapers to high performance geotextiles. The essential requirements of these applications are good understanding of the raw material characteristics and process parameters in order to achieve the desired product properties. 

Soil Clay is the primary construction material for settling basins and waste treatment evaporation ponds. Since there is no single type of clay even within a given geographic area, the shrinkage, porosity absorption characteristics, and chemical resistance must be checked for each application. Geotextiles can be incorporated into basin and pond clay construction to improve the performance of the structure. 

Areas where geotextiles are used as reinforcement include embankment construction, reinforced soil wall construction, and slope improvement. In reinforcement, the physical properties of importance are primarily related to strength, that is, a combination of the stress—strain characteristics of the material. 

Reinforcement. Soil is relatively strong in compression, but very weak in tension. Therefore, if a tensile inclusion (geotextile) is added to the soil and forms an intimate contact with it, a composite material can be formed which has superior mechanical characteristics in... 

Slip surface. A geotextile placed between two materials acts by minimising the frictional characteristics of the structure. 

Similarly, the nse of recycled polymers for the manufacture of geotextiles also affects their long-term dnrability. The recycled fibres are often of mixed type and therefore the geotextiles produced from these fibres may not have the same performance and consistency as those of the virgin material-based geotextiles. Therefore, it must be noted that the chemical and mechanical durability characteristics of geotextiles should be considered while designing these materials for the required applications. 

From the above description of the basic geo-filtration mechanism, it becomes evident that the performance of geotextiles as filter media depends largely on two properties the material s cross-plane permeability and pore-size characteristics. 

Similar to the filtration function, the requirements for drainage are soil retention, adequate flow capacity, and long term soil-to-geotextile flow equilibrium, in respect of minimum clogging of the pore spaces. Apart from the flow capacity within the plane of the geosynthetic material, the other aspects have been dealt with above. We will therefore now consider the inplane flow characteristics. 

Separation placed between two layers of soil or granular material of differing particle sizes, a geotextile with suitable pore size characteristics would form a barrier to the migration of particles from one layer to another. 

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