ABSTRACT
Forest roads are fundamental infrastructures to provide the necessary access to the forest. Most forest roads are unpaved, formed using a superficial layer of unsealed gravel or aggregate, and often local soils or a mix of these two types of material. Herein, two local Portuguese soils were studied, assessing their potential use in unpaved forest roads, namely by including reinforcement with a geocomposite, and by performing CBR and triaxial tests, and estimating key design properties using proposals from the literature. The CBR test results indicate little improvement of the response due to the reinforcement. The triaxial test results show a clear effect of the reinforcement, namely for higher axial strains. The stiffness of the composite material increased relative to the unreinforced soil, particularly for higher strains, and decreased the post-peak softening. The correlations used for estimating the resilient modulus of the soils led to a large scatter of values. Thus, they must be quantified using tests or by proposing adequate relations to other geotechnical properties, extending existing databases.
