Field monitoring evaluation of geotextile-reinforced soil-retaining walls

摘要

ABSTRACT: The use of geotextiles as reinforcement in soil-retaining walls may offer benefits overnthe use of other types of reinforcement, such as metallic strips or geogrids. These include ease ofnconstruction, expediency, and significant cost reduction. However, the lack of field monitoringnresults documenting the behavior of geotextile-reinforced structures, mainly regarding deformations,nhas precluded widespread utilization of these systems. A better understanding of the behavior ofngeotextile-reinforced soil structures could be gained by systematic monitoring of full-scalenstructures, combined with a thorough material characterization program. Accordingly, eightnprototype geotextile-reinforced soil structures were built as part of a comprehensive study aimed atnanalyzing their behavior. This paper presents the characteristics of the prototype wall used asnbaseline for this series of structures, including construction details, instrumentation layout, and thenresults of laboratory tests conducted to characterize the soils and geosynthetics involved in thisnstructure. The lateral displacements at the face of the wall were small, with increasing lateralndisplacements observed over time, particularly in association with precipitation events during thensummer season in Brazil. The largest horizontal strains occurred towards the face, at mid-height ofnthe prototype wall. The use of sigmoid curves to fit displacement results within the geotextiles wasnfound to be very useful to define the value and the location of the peak strain in eachnreinforcement layer. The location of maximum reinforcement strains within each layer was found tonbe consistent with the development of a potential failure surface starting at the toe of the wall andnpropagating into the soil mass. The maximum reinforcement tension predicted using the K-stiffnessnmethod was found to compare well with reinforcement tension values obtained from monitoringnresults.npavement systems.