The effect of the shape of soil earth reinforcement bars on pullout resistance

Abstract EN

The main objective of this paper is to investigate the effect of the shape of soil earth reinforcement bars on the pullout resistance.

For this reason, two types of rounded steel bars – (deformed and smooth rounded bars) – and four different shapes of strip steel bars were used herein.

A special small scale box with 14 cm thickness was manufactured to conduct the pullout test using direct shear apparatus.

The steel bars were embedded in the center of a sand layer with 12 cm thickness inside the special box.

The pullout test was conducted on the six shapes of steel bars under different initial normal load conditions.

It was found that the rounded deformed bar has the highest pullout resistance while the smooth strip bar has the lowest pullout resistance and the mobilized interfacial angle is the highest for the deformed rounded bar.

Additionally, the pullout resistance increased for all shapes of bars as the normal load increased.