The Perforamnce of Geobag Revetments for Riverbank Protection

Geobag revetments have recently emerged as long-term riverbank protection measures in developing countries, however, their performance is still not well understood. This paper details the results of an extensive laboratory programme undertaken to both help improve our understanding of geobag revetment performance and provide the data required to develop robust design guidelines. Building upon previous work, a 1:10 scale model was tested in a laboratory flume, comparing a range of different construction methods and revetment side slopes, subjected to different flow loading. The results indicate that whilst failure mechanisms are highly dependent on water depth and revetment slope, the construction method had no noticeable impact, and it was concluded that the dominating factor is the friction between individual geobags, which itself is dependent on bag overlap rather than specific construction method. Furthermore, flow velocity measurements taken during both the pre-failure and post-failure stages indicated that the formation of failure zones leads to a decrease in turbulence, and a subsequent stabilization of the failure process.