Performance of Sand–Rubber Mixture Infill Trench for Ground Vibration Screening

Abstract

Ground vibrations arising from construction and industrial activities and road/rail traffic can induce settlement issues, cracks, and severe damage to adjacent and remote structures. One of the well-established methods to eliminate such unwanted ground-borne vibrations is to incorporate trench barriers between the source of vibration and the structure to be protected. Recently, the use of shredded rubber from recycled tires has gained prominence in various geotechnical applications. The high energy absorption capacity of rubber is well established in the past, making it an ideal material in vibration mitigation studies. In the present study, 2D finite element analysis was carried out to investigate the use of sand–rubber tire mixture (SRM) infill trench barriers for the screening of ground-borne vibration due to vertical ground vibrations. In the present study, the typical soil profile from the Indo-Gangetic plain region is considered. 1 m width open and SRM infill trenches with a depth of 1–3 m are considered. The rubber content in the SRM fill trenches was chosen as 30% and 50%. The hyper elastic material model was adopted for the modeling of the SRM infill trench, while the soil medium was modeled using the hypoelastic constitutive model. The ground excitation was created by applying sinusoidal vertical motion with 2 m/s amplitude and a frequency of 50 Hz at the ground surface away from the trench. During the excitation, the vibration levels were computed at different locations in front of and away from the trenches. It was found that SRM infill trench with 50% rubber content performs similar to the open trenches to reduce the vertical vibration amplitude.