Creep Behaviour of Recycled Poly(ethylene) Terephthalate Non-Woven Geotextiles

Abstract

At the beginning of this century, due to well-established Brazilian recycling processes, geosynthetics’ manufacturers started to use recycled poly(ethylene) terephthalate (PET) yarns/filaments (from PET bottles) in geotextile production. Despite the fact that recycled products cannot act as reinforcement functions, geosynthetics are constantly under sustained tensile load and experiences evolutions of the axial strain (creep behaviour). Thus, this study aims to assess the influence of the structure of (needle-punched) non-woven geotextiles manufactured using recycled PET yarns on their creep behaviour. Two geotextiles with different fibre/filament production processes were investigated (short-staple fibres—GTXnwS—and continuous filaments—GTXnwC). Unconfined in-isolated conventional and accelerated (using the stepped isothermal method) creep tests were performed at 5%, 10%, 20%, 40% and 60% of geotextiles’ ultimate tensile strength. The geotextiles investigated provided similar creep behaviour to geotextiles manufactured with virgin PET material. The standard deviation of the axial strain tends to increase as the load level applied increase. The structure of the GTXnwS harms its tensile –strain behaviour, promoting axial deformation under sustained loads, at least 50% higher than GTXnwC for the same load level applied. The influence of the load level and geotextile structure in the initial axial strain is pointed out. Long-term predictions based on creep tests performed using the stepped isothermal method have proven to be conservative and they must be restricted for quality control of the investigated geotextiles.