

The use of fiber reinforced polymers has been rapidly expanding to almost all engineering branches. Historically, aerospace engineering has used composite materials to solve their specific needs. Composites have also been used extensively in automobile industry, sport goods mechanical engineering, defense industry etc. In the past few decades, composite materials have found application into other engineering areas like structural engineering. Nowadays the use of composite materials in civil engineering has been explored extensively by many researchers. However, composite materials are still not commonly used in geotechnical engineering. This paper deals with that aspect and proposes the potential use of composites in some geotechnical problems. To this end, an experimental investigation was carried out to find static and dynamic properties of an in-house Kevlar fiber-reinforced polymer (KFRP). The KFRP specimens used in the experimental program were formed in the laboratory using easy-to-get commercial components, with inexpensive techniques. It should be stressed that the components used were relatively cheap as compared to those commonly used in the composites industry. Composite materials are still very expensive to build, especially when very sophisticated techniques are used to build them. The components used in this research were chosen such that they gave the best cost-benefit relation from the available choices in the non-specialized market. The specimens were conformed by wet lay-up technique and were cured in a vacuum bag in the laboratory under room temperature conditions. Kevlar fiber was used because it is easy to get from any DuPont distributor worldwide, and because its price is competitive with other high-performance fibers like carbon fibers. Also, Aramid fibers (like Kevlar) have very light weight and high tension strength as compared to fiber glass, which is very popular in the composites market. The laboratory program carried out included bending tests, free vibration tests and cycling loading. Global properties were back-calculated from these tests. Also, a strength-of-materials model was used to compute the composite's properties and its results agreed well with laboratory results. Static laboratory tests were simulated in a finite element model to corroborate experimental and analytical results. Finally, numerical simulations of the use of the advanced KFRP were carried out to show its potential use in geotechnical testing applications.