Study of Geosynthetic Reinforced Retaining Wall under Various Loading

Abstract

AbstractReinforcement in the soil can be used to enhance the behavior of retaining walls under seismic loading in terms of improved overall stability of the structure. Mechanically Stabilized Earth (MSE) retaining walls, referred to as “segmental” retaining walls owing to their use of segmental blocks as facing elements for reinforcement, have been extensively used in recent years as permanent retaining structures. Nevertheless, in case of high retaining wall, tiered walls are preferred over a single height retaining wall due to their cost-effectiveness and more stability than conventional MSE walls. However, the behavior of tiered MSE retaining wall is not yet studied thoroughly. In the present paper, an attempt has been made to examine the behavior of tiered MSE walls having a height of 12 m under static and seismic loading using the numerical analysis. The present paper compares the stability of tiered MSE walls with a conventional MSE wall in terms of factor of safety (FOS) and possible mode of failure. This study discusses the effect of the length of geogrid in multiple layers on the stability of the reinforced retaining wall due to various seismic excitation levels and also investigates the generated failure modes.KeywordsMSE wallsFEMNumerical modelingTwo-tier wall