Geo-Syn Products now supplies the full line of Geotex Geotextile tubes and high strength fabrics from Synthetic Industries.

Geotextile tubes are large, sand filled fabric bags of lengths up to several hundred feet. They are designed to handle pressurized flows and are quickly filled by pumping in a sand slurry. The water seeps out of the fabrics leaving the sand inside. After filling, they are oval in cross-section and quite massive and hard. The geotextile shell is weather resistant and will last many years. They are presown to project specifications.

Geotextile tubes are used to create a number of shoreline protection structures such as dune cores, groins, jetties, breakwaters, and coastal barriers as well as providing a means of dewatering and containing dredge materials or industrial wastes. They are also used to form the dikes around containment ponds. Geotextile-based coastal protections can often be inexpensively built using the dredge material that is usually discarded when a navigation channel, marina or harbor is being maintained. Alternately, sand for filling the tube(s) can be pumped from nearshore or trucked to the site.

The installation process consists of the following:

When filling on a beach, a trapezoidal trench or saddle is often formed in the sand first and lined with the scour apron and the still empty tube. This provides a stable base for the tube and allows the maximum height to be achieved. Straps can be used to hold up the fabric to gain greater height when filling. The tube is usually placed on top of a geotextile scour apron to prevent undercutting of the tube's foundation during coastal storms. To pump the sand, a dredge is selected based on the size of the project and desired flow rates. For example, a faster IMS submerged cutter head type or a slower jet pump may be used to create a slurry of sand and water which is pumped through a discharge line into the tube's filling ports. Another purpose of the scour apron is to reduce local erosion caused by the flow of water out during the filling process. Geotextile tubes are also stackable.

Tubes can be almost any practical length or can be overlapped to achieve further continuous distances. Tube circumferences can also vary from 15 up to 45 feet. A thirty foot circumference tube contains approximately 2.1 cubic yards of sand per foot and fill rates of 300 linear feet per day for this tube size are achievable. Synthetic Industries fabricates Geotex tubes from high-quality, high-strength woven polyester or polypropylene. They are also available with non-woven liners for containment projects.

The benefits of geotextile tubes include their speed of installation and use of inexpensive, readily available on-site fill material. They are also easy to remove should site conditions or project objectives change.