Study on cyclic strength and pore water pressure response of fiber-reinforced municipal solid waste (MSW) fines

Abstract

One of the major challenges that countries all over the world are dealing with is their generated waste. Most of the research in the past few decades also focuses on the bulk utilization of this existing waste for different applications. This study focuses on the utilization of a part of municipal solid waste, i.e., MSW fines (particle size < 4.75 mm) reinforced with segregated fibers from the waste itself. The research investigates the influence of waste fiber content (FC) (0, 0.5, 1, 2, 4, 8, and 10%) on the dynamic parameters of MSW fines. The results revealed that the fiber inclusion remarkably influenced the shear strength parameters under monotonic loading and attained their optimum values when 8% of fiber content was applied. This study shows no significant improvements in dynamic shear modulus (G) of fiber-reinforced MSW fines under cyclic loading in the case of both unconsolidated undrained and consolidated undrained tests conducted on a cyclic triaxial test system. However, a significant improvement was noticed in the case of damping ratio (D) with FC. Further, a ru (excess pore water pressure ratio) model for fiber-reinforced MSW fines is suggested to predict the behavior of ru, which depends on two parameters, namely FC and γ (shear strain). © 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature.