Comparison between field monitoring and numerical results of a woven geotextile-reinforced soil retaining wall

摘要

The use of geotextiles as reinforcements in soil retaining walls may result in significant benefits over the use of other reinforcement with other inclusions such as metallic strips or geogrids. However, the lack of a good understanding of the actual behavior of geotex-tile-reinforced structures, mainly regarding expected deformations, has prevented widespread utilization of this approach. To contribute for a better understanding of the behavior of geotextile-reinforced soil structures, monitoring of full-scale structures and a further characterization of the materials is needed. Accordingly, eight geotextile-reinforced soil structures were built and instrumented to analyze their behavior. This paper presents the field monitoring results and finite element analyses conducted to analyze the behavior of one of these structures. The results show that current design procedures are conservative, and that the displacements are smaller than expected. The numerical simulation results showed that the Finite Element Method (FEM) is a useful tool to predict the response of structures reinforced with geosynthetics, since the values collected from field instrumentation are very similar to those obtained from numerical simulation.