Study the Potential of Plastic Waste Bottles as Geo-Cells for Maintenance of Pot-Holes in Flexible Pavement

Abstract

Flexible pavements are frequently damaged with excessive cracks, settlements, and potholes. Due to various reasons, these defects are occurring namely: less bitumen content, overload and poor subgrade compaction, poor drainage or poor subgrade itself. There are many options to maintain and repair such defects. Since last few decades, geo-synthetics material is introduced in market for various geotechnical application. These include use of geotextiles, geo-nets, geo-grids, geo-membrane, geo-cell etc. for ground improvement, providing drainage, separating two layers, as impervious layer and reinforcement. Out of all these applications geo-cell have great capacity to overcome poor bearing capacity of subgrade by its installation. On other hand use of plastic bottles for storing water, juice, oil, milk and other multiple things have increased exponentially. The polyethylene bottles have same material properties as that of geo-synthetic material. In this study, an attempt is made to study the effectiveness of waste plastic bottle fabricated in geo-cell for repair of potholes. For this, geo-cell derived as above is placed at the area of pothole near base course. This is simulated in the laboratory model of 1 × 1 × 1 m pit and plate load test as well as CBR is carried out for pavement performance after repair in terms of settlement and bearing capacity.