Horizontal deformation in reinforced soil walls

Abstract

The results of a numerical study of the horizontal deformations of reinforced soil walls with a continuous panel facing are presented. The most important material parameters are shown to be the reinforcement stiffness density and the backfill soil friction angle. The soil-facing interface friction angle, reinforcement-soil friction angle, soil Young's modulus, and facing rigidity are less important. For backfill soil having a friction angle greater than or equal to 35°, the common practice of using a truncated reinforcement scheme with reinforcement length equal to 70% of the wall height was found to be justified. Increasing the reinforcement length did not significantly reduce deformations; however, reducing the length below about 45% of the wall height did significantly increase deformations. Equally spaced reinforcement was found to give lower deformations than a "balanced" scheme, in which the spacing of reinforcement decreases with depth to provide a more uniform distribution of force in the reinforcement layers. A comparison of the numerical results and the results from an approximate method indicates reasonable agreement and identifies situations where the approximate method is most likely to give accurate results.Key words: soil reinforcement, geosynthetics, analysis, deformations, strains, forces.

Development and verification of a numerical model for the analysis of geosynthetic-reinforced soil segmental walls under working stress conditions

“…The survey by classified the numerical modelling attempts into two major groups on the basis of whether or not numerical results were compared with measurements from physical models, including field-instrumented walls. Many of the studies reviewed by the authors investigated the response of idealized reinforced soil wall models (e.g., Ho and Rowe 1996;Rowe and Ho 1998;Hatami et al 2001). Relatively fewer studies are available in the literature that report direct comparisons of numerical results and experimentally measured results from full-scale instrumented walls (e.g., Gotteland et al 1996Gotteland et al , 1997Karpurapu and Bathurst 1995;Ling et al 2000;Lopes et al 1994;Biondi et al 2000).…”

Influence of Soil Reinforcement on Horizontal Displacement of MSE Wall

“…Another important aspect of reinforced earth numerical modeling is the use of an appropriate constitutive model to predict soil behavior. The literature indicated a number of case studies in which MSE walls were modeled using the elastic-plastic Mohr-Coulomb constitutive model that yielded satisfactory results (Bergado and Teerawattanasuk 2008;Reddy and Navarrete 2008;Kim et al 2010;Rowe and Ho 1998;Pierson et al 2011;Leshchinsky and Vulova 2001). Huang et al (2009) presented a study on segmental reinforced soil walls using modified Duncan-Chang, Lade, and Mohr-Coulomb constitutive models.…”

“…A previous study indicated that the variation in displacement was negligible for the reduction in interface angle from 1.0 to 0.67 of reinforced-fill friction (Rowe and Ho 1998). Therefore, interface friction between soil and reinforcement was considered to be 0.67 of the friction angle of reinforced backfill.…”

“…The illustrated results corresponded to reinforcedand retained-fill friction angles of 34 and 30°, respectively. Reinforcement stiffness values were presented in logarithmic scale for ease of visualization (Rowe and Ho 1998;Siddiquee and Alam 2005). Fig.…”

“…The variation in horizontal deformation with reinforcement stiffness can be explained by the study conducted by Rowe and Ho (1998). According to that study, a reinforced soil system provides resisting force to maintain equilibrium condition in the MSE wall.…”