Abdolhosein Haddad - Civil Eng. Dept. Semnan University, Iran
Jalil Jalali - Munich Technical University (TUM), Germany

Nowadays geotextile sand containers find their application as construction elements for erosion control, scour fill and dune revetments. The term geotextile container encompasses all elements that use a geosynthetics fabric as the material to enclose materials such as sand, concrete, waste material, etc. Such elements include bags of all sizes, tubes, mattresses of different shape, gabions and more. The mechanical behaviors of stacked geotextile sand containers are very complex and they are involved in the properties of the filling material, geotextile and foundation response. The aim of this study is to explore the maximum circumferential tension of geotextile sand containers with various properties of filling materials and soils of foundation. In this study the commercial finite element analysis program, ABAQUS, was used for modeling the problem. It is shown that the influence of foundation stiffness can’t be neglected. Also the stability analysis of geotextile sand containers is composed of hydraulic and geotechnical stability analysis. This paper uses the recommended hydraulic stability design criteria by Pilarczyk to calculate the hydraulic stability of geotextile sand containers. These calculation results show that the 70% or 80% of filling degree is the preferable and the double tubes on the bottom can improve the hydraulic stability.

Sand Filled Containers, Geotextile, Stability, Finite element analysis