Parametric Studies on the Behaviour of Reinforced Soil Retaining

Extensive researches have been conducted to either investigate the reinforcement
mechanisms or quantify a certain aspect of the reinforcement effects such as stress
reduction for reinforced embankments and structure number increase for reinforced
paved/unpaved roads, which include field and full-scale tests (e.g., Hatami and
Bathurst 2005; Kwon et al. 2009b) as well as numerical modelling (e.g., Hatami and
Bathurst 2005 and 2006; Huang 2007).
It is interesting to know that numerical modelling of reinforced earth retaining wall
and other structures has been increasingly adopted in researches since in addition to
their outstanding cost- and time-effectiveness, they possess the following preferable
advantages as compared with the field and full-scale tests:
Flexibility: Variables can be easily fixed or varied to assess their effects;
parametric studies can be easily performed.
Comprehensive data: The numerical modelling can provide a complete set of
data, some of which are difficult or not able to be obtained from instrumentations
such as shear stress/strain.
Efficiency for long-term behavior performance study: The long-term
performance is one of the interests for research and practice, e.g., consolidation
of reinforced embankments and creep behaviour of MSE walls. Given the
appearance of geosynthetic in 1970’s, valid long-term monitoring data are rare.
Numerical modelling can extend the time domain to the point of interest.
Exclusion of scale effect and external disturbance: Full-scale laboratory tests
tend to be influenced by scale, more or less and field tests are inevitably
disturbed by external impacts. These scale effect and external disturbance can be
easily excluded from or minimized in the numerical modelling.
Minimum measurement errors: The experimental data intrinsically possess
measurement errors, which is not a problem in numerical modelling.
Considering the above merits of the numerical modelling, numerical modelling plays
an important, sometime irreplaceable, role in promoting the research and practice.
This research work employs the use of Plaxis version 8, a finite element program and
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