Long Term Behavior of EPS Geofoam for Road Embankments Sherif S. AbdelSalam 1(&) , Mona B. Anwar 2 , and Sylvia S. Eskander 2 1 Civil and Infrastructure Engineering and Management, Faculty of Engineering and Applied Science, Nile University, Giza 12588, Egypt sabdelsalam@nu.edu.eg 2 Civil Engineering, Faculty of Engineering and Materials Science, German University in Cairo, Cairo, Egypt {mona.anwar,sylvia.emil}@guc.edu.eg Abstract. In recent years expanded polystyrene (EPS) geofoam has success- fully been used to reduce the acting vertical and horizontal stresses in several geotechnical applications due to its light weight, compressibility, and durability. In this study the ef ficiency of utilizing EPS blocks as a replacement for typical soil embankments under roadways was investigated. Accordingly, a detailed laboratory program was completed to measure the short- and long-term behaviors of EPS, which included unconfined compression (UC) and creep strain (CS) tests based on the time–temperature–stress superposition (TTSS) technique. Loading type applied during testing was cyclic loading to mimic the actual conditions under roadways, while the EPS density used was 35 kg/m 3 to minimize deformations. The main outcome of this study was providing mea- sured properties for local EPS considering creep stain after 100 years of cyclic loading, and these properties are ought to provide reliable design for EPS embankments under roadways. 1 EPS for Road Embankments Expanded polystyrene (EPS), or geofoam has been used in geotechnical applications since the 1960’s. Reference to EPS Industry Alliance (2012), EPS is approximately 1% of the soil weight, and is less than 10% the weight of other lightweight fill alternatives. This makes EPS embankments lighter compared with compacted soil embankments, and accordingly reduces the dead loads imposed on underlying soil. This also translates into benefits to construction cost and time, and simplicity of construction as EPS blocks are easy to handle without the need for special equipment, and can be easily cut and shaped on site. EPS geofoam is available in various densities that can be selected by the designer depending on a specific geotechnical application. Its durability and service life are comparable to other construction materials as it retains its physical properties under various conditions (AbdelSalam and Azzam 2016). In 2012, Bartlett et al. (2012) studied the used EPS as an embankment for the interstate roadway I-15 in Salt Lake City, Utah, USA. The idea of using EPS blocks was to mitigate settlement and expedite construction on soft clay, while the importance of using EPS was to improve the stability of the embankment. At some bridge © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019 M. Meguid et al. (Eds.): GeoMEast 2018, SUCI, pp. 97–107, 2019. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-01944-0_8