Influence of Metallic Strip Reinforcement Length and Retained Soil Properties on the Reinforced Earth Walls Stability

Reinforced earth (RE) walls work as gravity-retaining structures which these composite structures rely on the self-weight of the reinforced soil mass to resist lateral loads from earth pressure, surcharges from vehicles, earthquakes, and water pressure. The type of compacted backfill material at the reinforced zone and reinforcement length that was designed and constructed has a capability to form a reinforced-soil mass that provides sufficient self-weight to stabilize the overall retaining structure. The stability of the reinforcement-soil interface and the strength of the reinforcement provide the internal stability of the structure, which allows the RE wall to act as a unit and be able to sustain significant loading and deformation where the wall stability was highly depending on the type of backfill soil properties and the reinforcement strip length. Therefore, in this research, the safety factor of the RE wall was analyzed by using a different type of soil properties i.e., silt and clayey soil with a different of reinforcement length using finite element modelling PLAXIS 2D and PLAXIS 3D approach. Both numerical modelling results shows that the effects of clayey soil as a backfill material at the reinforced zone gives higher wall deformation compared to silt soil. Besides that, this analysis also shows that the reinforcement length, LR has a significant impact on the wall deformation; as the reinforcement strip length increased, the wall deformation significantly reduced. The finding this research shown that numerical modelling PLAXIS 2D gives conservative design as it gives higher value of wall deformation and lower safety factor compared to PLAXIS 3D.