Influence of surface texture on sand–steel interface strength response

Abstract

The surface texture of the interface material plays a significant role in the shear behaviour of soil–continuum interface. This study investigates the influence of surface texture of steel on the shear behaviour of sand–steel interface using different types of steel counterfaces with distinct texturing patterns. The patterns include concentric circular asperities, square-tiled surfaces with equally spaced individual asperities and ruled ribbed asperities oriented parallel, perpendicular and at an angle to the shear direction. The results show that the texturing pattern of the steel counterface significantly affects the shear strength of the sand–steel interface. The peak and residual interface friction angles for the sand–steel interfaces with different texturing patterns (with identical asperity height and spacing) varied from 26·6° to 37·5° and 14·2° to 28·7°, respectively. Moreover, the surface with ruled ribs/asperities inclined at right angle to the shear direction shows the maximum interface shear strength among all the texturing patterns tested. The findings presented herein are imperative for a realistic assessment of the performance of geotechnical structures involving soil–steel interaction.

The shaft friction degradation of piles under cyclic axial loading in wind turbine foundations.

“…If the normalized waviness increases beyond this point, interface strength decreases, thus inhibiting passive resistance. For example, Samanta et al (2018b) and Su et al (2018) used normalized waviness values of 0.25 and 0.50, respectively, and these authors achieved interfacial-to-internal friction angle ratios under 1.0. Different from the results presented herein, these studies were focused on the performance of the sandsteel interface with triangular-and square-spaced ribs.…”

“…In these studies, interface strength was limited by sand strength. Alternative studies regarding the sand-steel interface suggest that interface strength can be higher than internal soil strength by superimposing surface roughness onto surface waviness (Irsyam and Hryciw, 1991;Frost and DeJong, 2005;Martinez and Frost, 2017;Samanta et al, 2018b). For soil-concrete interfaces, Chu and Yin (2006) and Qian et al (2017) evaluated the role of waviness for a completely decomposed granite-concrete interface and a silty sand-concrete interface under constant normal load conditions.…”

Study on the Effects of Grouting and Roughness on the Shear Behavior of Cohesive Soil–Concrete Interfaces

“…Following the work of Potyondy [8], who studied the interface between soil and various construction materials, many scholars have studied the characteristics of the soil-structure interface . These studies included apparatus modifications and new test methods [9][10][11], which were used to investigate the influence of surface properties on the traditional soil-structure interface (including soil-concrete, soil-steel, and soil-cement grout interfaces) [9,[12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25]33,34], the interfaces between new materials (including ice-soil and soil-geogrid interfaces) [26][27][28][29][30][31][32], and the exterior load conditions (stress history, monotonic load, or cyclic load condition) [35][36][37].…”

Strength anisotropy at soil-structure interfaces with snake skin inspired structural surfaces

“…The behaviour of sand-structure interfaces is a subject of ongoing research considering their importance for the design and capacity of many geotechnical structures, such as retaining walls, deep foundations, tunnel-linings, and shallow foundations subjected to inclined loads. Beside the influences of factors such as soil density, particle shape, normal stress, and test conditions [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8], the influence of the surface roughness magnitude and form is of great importance [9,10,11].…”

“…Usually, the strength of a soil-structure interface is a function of the surface's roughness and hardness [3,4,6]. In addition, other authors such as Irsyam and Hryciw [12] studied the effect of topology and geometrical arrangement of the surface profile for a series of ribbed surfaces.…”