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Experimental study on the soil mixture to promote vegetation for slope protection and landslide prevention

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Abstract

Water infiltration is one of the most important triggers of landslides. Vegetation is an effective way to mitigate water infiltration, reduce soil surface cracking, and, consequently, prevent landslides. In recent years, a soil mixture has been successfully used to grow vegetation on steep soil/rock surfaces by hydroseeding or shotcreting. The mixture contains seven ingredients, namely cement, fiber, peat, water retention agent, soil conditioner, soil, and pH adjusting agent. This study includes a germination and growth field test and a series of lab shear strength tests to assess: (1) the influence of the mixture’s ingredients on germination and growth of the vegetation and (2) the effect of cement and fiber on the shear strength of the cured mixture. For the germination and growth test, the Taguchi method was utilized to determine the content of each ingredient (i.e., the percentage of each ingredient) used to prepare different mixtures. Cynodon dactylon was planted in different mixtures and the germination and growth had been monitored for 3 months. The results indicated that the cement content had a significant influence on germination whereas the content of peat, soil conditioner, fiber, and water retention agent had a medium to negligible influence on germination. The content of all the ingredients had an influence on the plant’s growth and the influence of the cement content was the greatest. When the cement content is higher than 10 %, the growth of the plant is greatly hindered; therefore, to ensure a reasonable growth in the field, the cement content should be less than 10 %. The shear strength tests used the sample prepared with different contents of cement and fiber, but the same porosity. The results showed that the contents of cement and fiber had a negligible influence on the friction angle, and the cohesion increased with the increase of cement content or decrease of the fiber content. Curing time of 7–14 days yielded the maximal cohesion.

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Acknowledgments

This work was partially supported by key project of Ministry of Education (2010133), program for New Century Excellent Talents in University of Ministry of Education of China (NCET-11-0962) and National Natural Science Foundation of China (51178166).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Geotechnical Engineering and Underground Construction, School of Civil Engineering and Architecture, Hubei University of Technology, Wuhan, 430068, China

    Henglin Xiao, Qiang Ma, Juan Wan, Lihua Li & Quan Peng

  2. Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, The University of Texas at San Antonio, One UTSA Circle, San Antonio, TX, 78249, USA

    Jie Huang & Sepehr Rezaeimalek

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  1. Henglin Xiao
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  2. Jie Huang
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  3. Qiang Ma
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  4. Juan Wan
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  5. Lihua Li
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  6. Quan Peng
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  7. Sepehr Rezaeimalek
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Correspondence to Jie Huang.

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Xiao, H., Huang, J., Ma, Q. et al. Experimental study on the soil mixture to promote vegetation for slope protection and landslide prevention. Landslides 14, 287–297 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10346-015-0634-x

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