Impact Containment Barriers with Geotextile Tubes

Recently, tragic tailings dam collapses in Brazil have caused deaths and major destruction and the need to develop technologies capable of preventing damage to people and the environment. Brazilian tailings dams are in a situation of uncertainty due to new legislation that even requires decommissioning, an activity that involves many problems and where the risk of failure is the main one. An impact containment structure downstream of these dams can be effective and geotextile tubes, in a new approach, have emerged as an option with advantages in terms of execution, costs and safety. The technology is versatile and can bring many benefits such as the reuse of tailings or filling with low-energy or reused materials. In this research, geotextile tubes were tested as free containment barriers, experiencing impacts in reduced models. The safety factor for the stability of the structure was constructed using an equation which is the ratio between the self-weight of the barrier structure and its coefficient of static friction and the impact pressure, where the data showed an adequate correlation which suggests the viability of mitigating risks.

Shape and Mechanical Behavior of Geotextile Tubes

Nowadays, geotextile tubes hydraulically filled with dredged materials have been used in the application of cofferdam, sea reclamation and deepwater channel regulation in China. The shape and mechanical behaviors during the process of filling, consolidation and stacked are one of the main problems concemed by designers and researchers.This paper uses the method of elliptic integrals to study the behaviors of filling and deduces the regressive formulas of shape features and circumferential tension. The results show that the proposal regressive formulas are only the function of pressure at bottom; they are very convenient and suitable for the filling design. When the filling materials are sandy, the shape and mechanical behaviors nearly remain during the process of consolidation. The behaviors of stacked geotextile tubes are very complex, because they are involved in the properties of the filling material, geotextile and foundation.Using the commercial finite element analysis program ABAQUS, this paper establishes the entire 2- D finite element load model to investigate, which include the part of filling material, geotextile and foundation. The numerical results suggest that the maximun circumferential tension varies with the properties of filling materials and foundations, whereas the largest tensile force occurs during the filling process.

Design Methods for Geotextile Tubes Application in Dike Construction

The technique of geotextile tubes used to construct dikes for land reclamation has been widely used. The tubes are usually filled with slun＇y of soil, such as sand, silt or clay. The tensile stress developed in the geotextile during filling the tube is the dominant factor for construction of a safe dike. The existing design methods are good for designing sausage shaped tubes and can not be directly applied for designing fiat tubes, which are commonly used in dike construction. This paper presents a procedure that can detenmine the relatiorrship among the tube size, the pumping pressure, the unit weight of the slurry, and the tensile stress developed in the geotextile during the tube filing. When the tubes are piling up to form the dike, the tubes in the bottom will sustain the load from the weight of the upper ones. A procedure is also developed to calculate the changes of the mechanical and geometrical behavior of the tubes under the load with a similar method. All these approaches have been programmed, which can help dike designers to select the suitable geotextile and determine the profile of the dike.

Engineering geotextile tubes to be used in dyke construction

Geotextile tube technology has been increasingly used in dykes. In this work reinforcement theory and circle method were employed to examine the allowable tensile limit of the geotextile tube and the stability factor of the slip surface of the dyke. The formulas to calculate the layer-to-layer spacing and size of geotextile tubes applied to double prism dykes were deduced. The application of these formulas was illustrated by several examples. The calculation results indicate that unequal spacing arrangement is more economical than equal spacing and the layer number of required geotextile tubes decreases with the increase of allowable tensile strength of the geotextile.