Laboratory and field investigation of time-dependent behavior of geotextiles reinforcing a fine-grained soil are evaluated in this paper. The field assessment consisted of analyses of an instrumented section of a nonwoven geotextile reinforced soil wall. In addition, in-soil and in-isolation laboratory creep tests were conducted using the same geosynthetic and soil used in the Geosynthetic-Reinforced Soil (GRS) wall section to better assess time-dependent behaviors in the field. Construction and time-dependent behavior of the full-scale GRS wall proved to be satisfactory over the 4 years of monitoring of both woven and nonwoven geotextile structures. Soil confinement, due to vertical earth pressure on the reinforcement, was found to greatly affect the deformability of the nonwoven geotextile. Time-dependent strain rates were higher when the failure stress state of the soil was reached. Time-dependent behavior was underestimated from insoil laboratory creep tests and better estimated using in-isolation laboratory tests. However, the GRS wall data did not account for installation damage and wetting-drying processes, which were found to influence time dependent strain predictions.
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