Engineers in Florida have saved a substantial amount of time and money in a project that required the construction of embankments at the approaches of the proposed restoration, conversion, and expansion of an historic, single-lane swing truss bridge, known as the Sharpes Ferry Bridge over the Oklawaha River in Marion County, Florida. Rather than using conventional ground improvement techniques (i.e. surcharge, removal, etc.), GeoFoam EPS blocks were utilized to reduce the contact pressure over existing soft organic and clay soil deposits encountered at the site.During the design phase, it as estimated that 180 days were required to complete settlement of the underlying soft soils as a result of the weight of conventional fill surcharge. On top of that, 100 days of Maintenance of Traffic (MOT) time was allocated by the Contractor for the bridge work. This would have required about 9 months just for lane closure, which was deemed unacceptable by project stake holders. According to the case study, the use of GeoFoam aided in the elimination of the 180-day required settlement time frame, therefore greatly reducing the required MOT time.
What's interesting to note about this GeoFoam EPS block manufactured by Dyplast Products, is that it has a unit weight of 1.35 pounds per cubic foot (pcf), which is about 1% of the unit weight of conventional limerock fill used in Florida. Additionally, according to the manufacturer, the GeoFoam block has "compressive strengths equivalent to compacted soil at weights approaching 50 times higher."
This is a nice case study showing the usefulness of this type of geosynthetic. Have you had any experiences using GeoFoam blocks in any project? If so, which ones?
Article: Case Study
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