Why Use Geocells to Build Flexible Pavements
All over the world, people are increasingly using geocells to build long-lasting roadways with flexible pavements. Offering increased service life and easy construction with local infill materials, these three-dimensional structures are the perfect solution for rapid infrastructure development.
Indian roads experience a relentless parade of heavy traffic and extreme weather conditions that combine forces to wreak havoc on the construction material and the unconfined subgrade, resulting in untraversable routes. The Enviroweb soil stabilization system offers high-quality cellular confinement cells that can be filled with locally-sourced materials for increased strength and resistance against natural wear-and-tear.
Here are a few points explaining why geocells are the perfect solution to India’s road woes:
Increased Durability-
One of the major factors contributing to road degradation is the contraction and expansion of soil that happens in sync with the changing seasons. The subgrade soil turns dry during the summer months and shrinks, while during the monsoon it soaks water and expands.
Geocell reinforced flexible pavements counter this problem by confining thesubgrade infill material irrespective of quality. A flexible pavement layer built with geocells experiences a uniform distribution of shrinkage during the hot months and the perforated inner cell walls let the subsurface water filter out during the rainy season, thereby keeping all the layers stable and undamaged. This, in turn, increases the project’s life and endurance.
Lower Construction Costs-
Geocells also help you save bigtime on construction costs by allowing the use of regional or local soils as the infill material even if they are of poor quality as the cellular confinement cells will ensure strength and integrity. Additionally, you also save on transportation costs and construction time as you no longer need to wait for truckloads of expensive infill material.
This property of geocells can also be used to build highways and extend road connectivity in rural areas with poor-quality or difficult soils.
Last, but not the least- when you use geocells to reinforce pavements, you automatically reduce the cost incurred on building the topmost layer which incidentally is also the costliest. Geocells offer an effective load support system that allows for a thinner bituminous layer, and reduces base material requirements by 50% or more, once again cutting down the cost of construction.
Reduced Maintenance Costs-
Geocells provide increased structural strength via equal load distribution and significantly increase the lifecycle of the pavement, thereby reducing maintenance and repair costs.
When roads begin to deteriorate the damage usually begins with ‘alligator’ cracks in the bituminous concrete layer caused by extreme horizontal strains and/or rutting caused by excessive vertical strains in the subsurface pavement layer.
On the other hand a geocell-reinforced pavement crust has a uniform load-distribution with increased strength and stiffness.
Simple and Quick Instant Installation
Apart from being easy to transport, geocells are also easy to install. You can lay out the entire grid in a matter of hours and fill it up within as little as a day. Once your subgrade is secure, you can then move onto building the the upper layers.
See more at- http://envirogeosystems.com/