Габионы: Клетки, наполненные камнем.

Cage full of rock

A gabion (from Italian gabbione meaning "big cage"; from Italian gabbia and Latin cavea meaning "cage") is a cage, cylinder or box filled with rocks, concrete, or sometimes sand and soil for use in civil engineering, road building, military applications and landscaping. For erosion control, caged riprap is used. For dams or in foundation construction, cylindrical metal structures are used. In a military context, earth or sand filled gabions are used to protect sappers, infantry, and artillerymen from enemy fire. Leonardo da Vinci designed a type of gabion called a Corbeille Leonard ("Leonard[o] basket") for the foundations of the San Marco Castle in Milan.

The most common civil engineering use of gabions was refined and patented by Gaetano Maccaferri in the late 19th century in Sacerno, Emilia Romagna and used to stabilize shorelines, stream banks or slopes against erosion. Other uses include retaining walls, noise barriers, temporary flood walls, silt filtration from runoff, for small or temporary/permanent dams, river training, or channel lining. They may be used to direct the force of a flow of flood water around a vulnerable structure. Gabions are also used as fish screens on small streams. Gabion stepped weirs are commonly used for river training and flood control; the stepped design enhances the rate of energy dissipation in the channel, and it is particularly well suited to the construction of gabion stepped weirs. A gabion wall is a retaining wall made of stacked stone filled gabions tied together with wire. Gabion walls are usually battered (angled back towards the slope), or stepped back with the slope, rather than stacked vertically. The life expectancy of gabions depends on the lifespan of the wire, not on the contents of the basket. The structure will fail when the wire fails. Galvanized steel wire is most common, but PVC coated and stainless steel wire are also used. PVC coated galvanized gabions have been estimated to survive for 60 years. Some gabion manufacturers guarantee a structural consistency of 50 years. In the United States, gabion use within streams first began with projects completed from 1957 to 1965 on North River, Virginia, and Zealand River, New Hampshire. More than 150 grade control structures, bank revetments and channel deflectors were constructed on the two U. S. Forest Service sites. Eventually, a large portion of the in stream structures failed due to undermining and lack of structural integrity of the baskets. In particular, corrosion and abrasion of wires by bedload movement compromised the structures, which then sagged and collapsed into the channels. Other gabions were toppled into channels as trees grew and enlarged on top of gabion revetments, leveraging them toward the river channels. Gabions have also been used in building, as in the Dominus Winery in the Napa Valley, California, by architects Herzog & de Meuron, constructed between 1995 and 1997. The exterior is formed by modular wire mesh gabions containing locally quarried stone; this construction allows air movement through the building and creates an environment of moderate temperatures inside.

There are various special designs of gabions to meet particular functional requirements and some special terms for particular forms have come into use. For example:
Bastion: a gabion lined internally with a membrane, typically of nonwoven geotextile to permit the use of granular soil fill, instead of rock. Mattress: a form of gabion short in height relative to the lateral dimensions; commonly very wide. For protecting surfaces from wave erosion and similar attack, rather than building or supporting high structures. Trapion: a form of gabion with a trapezoidal cross section, designed for stacking to give a face that is sloping rather than stepped. The term is in wide usage, but in contexts related to gabions at least, appears to be a trademark registered by Betafence Limited.

Early gabions were round cages with open tops and bottoms, made from wickerwork and filled with earth for use as military fortifications. These early military gabions were most often used to protect sappers and siege artillery gunners. Second, when used as facing of earth reinforced structures with a vertical face, gabions offer a more deformable surface to impact compared to other classical geotechnical alternatives. This higher deformability results from crushing and large displacements of the fill content. As a result, the impact load transmitted to the structure is reduced, due to both impact energy dissipation and peak force attenuation. In an optimization process, the fill material can be adapted to meet specific requirements, in terms of impact response. This in particular led to the use of recycled materials (tires and ballast from railway tracks) in the core of some rockfall protection embankments.