Abstract: Soil-bags are a new earth reinforcement method and have been widely used in many projects including building foundations and slope reinforcement. A large number of researches on soil-bags show that soil-bags have significant vibration energy absorption effect. This paper investigates the effects of different soil fills in bags on vibration energy absorption. Cyclic simple shear tests are carried out on soil-bags filled with different soils and on soil-bags filled with soils that have different particle sizes, gradations and clay contents. The dynamic shear modulus and the equivalent damping ratios of the soil-bags and fill soils are analyzed. The test results show that the dynamic shear modulus of soil-bags are smaller and the equivalent damping ratios of soil-bags are higher than the fill soils. The dynamic shear modulus and equivalent damping of both the fill soils and the soil-bags are relatively higher in the cases that particle sizes of the fill soils are smaller, gradations are uniform and clay contents are larger. In general, the effects of the particle sizes and gradations of the fill soils are not pronounced on the equivalent damping ratios.

Key words: soil-bags, fill soils, cyclic simple shear test, particle size, gradation, clay content