ABSTRACT
Polymeric fabrics, nets and meshes were first introduced into civil engineering in the late 1960’s and, since then, there has been continuous development of the range of products, their applications, the design methods available and the construction techniques employed. Geosynthetics is the general term applied to the wide range of products which are now available. They are manufactured by many specialized processes using a number of different polymers (Koerner, 1998). This allows Geosynthetics to perform one or more functions, including Containment, Separation, Filtration, Erosion Control, Drainage and Reinforcement. The result is that Geosynthetics assume very different operational roles in different applications and specific properties are required in order for them to fulfill their various functions. Thus, there is a need to carefully match the operational properties of Geosynthetics to the operational requirements of the application in which they are to be used. In this paper, only reinforcement applications for Geosynthetics are considered.
