Abstract:
On average, one tire per capita per year is generated in Canada as a waste tire, which either goes to landfill or stockpile. Researchers across the world are trying alternative uses of scrap tires. Among many civil engineering applications, roadway embankment construction using tire-derived aggregates (TDA) is the most popular and ecologically viable due to large amount of consumption of material in the embankment. However, its deformability/ compressibility under applied load is an important consideration for design of tire shred embankment. The mechanical behavior of tire shreds is dependent on stress levels, which shows nonlinear viscoelastic-plastic behaviour. There is a lack of quantitative information on the compressibility characteristics of tire shred embankments. In this study, the finite element (FE) method is applied to assess the compressibility of the tire shred embankment. Nowadays FE method is being increasingly used in deformation analysis of pavements. Linear and nonlinear compressibility analysis of tire shred embankment is performed, assuming a multilayer elastic-isotropic system. The results show that deflections of the road calculated from nonlinear elastic analysis are significantly higher than those calculated using linear elastic model. The analysis also shows that small size tire shreds (50 mm) experience less deflection compared to large size tire shreds (300 mm). Resulted deflections obtained from FE calculations are then compared with the results from an analysis using a multilayer computer software, KENLAYER, available in published literature. Finally, the paper presents the key features of tire compressibility of different sizes of tire shreds observed during the FE analysis.
Contributors: Reza A, Hossain K, Dhar A S.