An integrated limiting equilibrium approach for design of reinforced soil retaining structures: Part I—formulation

Abstract

The present work presents a fully integrated limiting equilibrium process for design of reinforced soil retaining structures. Design examples based on this procedure are presented and discussed in the companion paper (Baker and Klein, 2003). The new features of the proposed procedure are: (1) It explicitly considers the properties of the three main elements wall–reinforcement–soils of the system. (2) Design requirements are formulated as local inequalities which are enforced at each relevant point rather then only globally. (3) The type of reinforcement and the interaction between reinforcement and soil is represented by response functions which can be established by pull-out tests. (4) Interaction between the wall and the reinforcing system is represented by a system of interaction parameters. The magnitudes of these parameters depend on the relative strengths of the wall and the anchoring system. The limiting situations of conventional reinforced soil design and classical (non-reinforced) retaining structures correspond to particular cases in which these parameters are equal to 0 and 1, respectively. Between those two limiting cases there exists a large range of intermediate design options which include different types of walls and reinforcement. (5) The design process results in distributions of tensile forces along each reinforcing layer, distribution of soil pressures acting on the wall, and distributions of shear forces and moments in the wall. These functions allow complete and rational design of all elements of the system.