A source of essential information regarding the behaviour of the soil-reinforcement system can be laboratory pullout tests. In this paper, basic aspects of such testing concerning the equipment used (designed and constructed in the Geotechnical Laboratory of Gdansk University of Technology) and procedures applied are described. The pullout tests carried out for biaxial polypropylene geogrids embedded in coarse sand are presented. Finally basing on the test results the interpretation procedure for the estimation of elasto-plastic interaction between geogrid and soil is proposed. The method proposed enables determining soil-geogrid interface: stiffness modulus responsible for elastic behaviour of the system in the range of permissible loads, as well as maximum pullout resistance corresponding to limit state.
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