Stabilisation of natural slopes using natural plant root as reinforcing agent

What is it about?

Soil bioengineering is the concept of utilizing plants, including its roots, to strengthen or stabilize soils with poor engineering properties such as soils in natural and manmade slopes. This technique is widely used in many countries and is also practised in India. Most of the research works done related to soil bio engineering are by ecological researchers, geotechnical research works related to utilizing the plant roots as reinforcement are few in India. In this research works, an attempt is made to study the strength variation in a landslide-affected soil by stabilizing the soil with plant roots obtained from readily available plants in the study area. The roots were obtained and a particular root mass (Lemon grass root) was introduced in the soil and the geotechnical property changes were verified. It was found that the incorporation of the plant roots in the soil matrix improved the stability of the soil. Consequently, the plant roots studied can be cheap materials for improving the stability of slopes, especially in landslide-affected areas.

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Why is it important?

Certain materials are strong in compression, others in tension, but not many materials are capable of withstanding shear forces. Soils most times fail when they experience shearing. It is believed that the shear strength of soil is insignificant compared to its bearing capacity and hence a need arises to improve the strength of the soil via convention and unconventional ways. Soil improvement is important while designing geosystems, i.e. slopes, dams, embankments and hydraulic barriers, where tensile cracks are likely to occur. Addition of discrete fibre reinforcement to a soil to improve its shear strength is an unconventional technique to improve soil mechanical behavior. Though the mechanical behavior of external fiber reinforced soil has been studied extensively, the effect of plant root fibre as a reinforcement of soils on its geotechnical properties are is not yet well ascertained .

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