STATIC AND SEISMIC BEHAVIOUR OF CULVERTS
CONSTRUCTED WITH TDA INCLUSION
The province of Ontario generates about 12 million tires half of which are recycled and
the rest are shipped out of province, mostly to be burned as fuel in cement factories. The
recent studies have highlighted several special properties of tire derived aggregate (TDA)
that can be used by civil engineers to address various engineering challenges. For
example, TDA is compressible, light weight, has high permeability and low thermal
conductivity.
Rigid culverts under high fills are often used in Ontario highway construction practice
where large vertical stresses acting on culverts. This study provides a series of static and
seismic numerical analyses to investigate the effect of TDA inclusions as a lightweight
compressible fill to reduce the static and seismic forces on culverts. The study
investigates the mechanical interaction between the culverts, yielding/non-yielding
foundation and TDA inlusion under both static and seismic loading conditions. The
analyses were performed using two-dimensional time domain finite element models,
which considered the nonlinear behaviour of soil and culvert. The finite element program
PLAXIS was utilized in the analyses.
Results indicated that the use of TDA inclusions above the culvert resulted in significant
reductions in the vertical stresses exerted on the culvert for non-yielding foundation
cases. However, such reductions were seen to diminish for yielding foundation cases. The
TDA inclusion was seen to have a significant impact on the culvert section forces and the
stresses on soil/structure interface. The numerical results showed that the seismic demand
on the culvert was reduced substantially by the TDA inclusion. The results presented in
this paper were considered to be of interest to the engineers and researchers.