One of the cost-effective and environmental friendly solutions to enhance ground slope stability especially in coastal areas is to plant vegetation such as grass. A study comprising experimental work and numerical simulation was undertaken to evaluate the effect of plants' roots on sloping ground stability. Plain soil samples with and without roots of grasses were collected from Ruston, Louisiana, and direct shear tests was performed on the samples to study effect of roots on soil shear strength. The study also included tensile strength of the grass roots. Based on results from the tensile and direct shear tests, slope stability analyses were performed to demonstrate the grass soil-binding capabilities. In the analyses, those roots were considered as independent anchor reinforcements for which tensile strengths were specified from tested samples with different root diameters. Variations in factor of safety of the slopes with and without root reinforcement subjected to different root diameters and different depths were investigated for the collected plants. An efficient method is being developed to evaluate the shear strength of grass root-reinforced soils and vegetation-covered soil slopes.
展开▼
