Behavior of weathering resistance for geotextile materials

Kary Lin, Amy Tang, Jason Wu

In the proceedings of: GeoOttawa 2017: 70th Canadian Geotechnical Conference; 12th joint with IAH-CNC

Session: Geosynthetics II

ABSTRACT: Geotextiles have been extensively used for all kinds of civil and environmental projects to account for the latest environmental concerns such as sustainability, global warming, energy saving and carbon reduction. However, many applications could expose geotextiles to sunlight directly for a long time and weaken their strength properties because of the effect of ultraviolet (UV) irradiation. Such degradation influences should be well considered to warrant a suitable long-term performance over the service life for the facilities. At present, natural outdoor exposure and laboratory accelerated weathering tests have commonly been used to investigate the effect of sunlight on the geotextiles. However, they all present advantages and weaknesses. Further studies are necessary to develop correlations of these methods and improve the prediction of long-term behavior in this regard. This research conducted an experimental program to explore the weathering resistance behavior for polypropylene (PP) geotextiles using actual outdoor exposure and laboratory accelerated exposure tests. Both Xenon Arc and UV fluorescent devices were used in laboratory for comparisons. Test results were analyzed and compared to develop correlations between different test methods. The study presented herein will be valuable for engineers in considering the effect of weathering resistances for outdoor applications with polypropylene geotextiles.

Please include this code when submitting a data update: GEO2017_309

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