EFFECTIVENESS OF JUTE GEOTEXTILES IN FLEXIBLE PAVEMENT CONSTRUCTION

Abstract

Jute, the forerunners of the manmade fibers, is used as a soil erosion control in highway side slope
protection and reinforcing section of new road on poor subgrade. The effectiveness of the jute geotextiles as
subgrade soil reinforcement for a flexible pavement has been investigated in this study. A systematic laboratory
investigation has been carried out on the sandy soil sample collected from an Integrated Development Project in
Dhaka city. Here, a comparative study is performed for the CBR values of the subgrade soil sample with jute
geotextiles and without jute geotextiles. The test results show that the CBR value increases significantly with the
application of jute geotextiles in subgrade soil. Further investigation has been carried out by placing jute geotextiles
at different layers to find out its influence over soil keeping the same dry densities. It is found that CBR increase
ratio is higher when jute geotextiles is placed at the bottom layers i.e. away from the loading point. It is also found
that in case of sandy soil, the use of jute geotextiles as subgrade reinforcement is less significant when larger
compaction effort has been applied.