Skip to content

Reinforced earth is as a construction system of retaining walls where tensile elements strengthen the soil, increasing the global shear resistance. Galvanized metal or polymeric strips may be used as reinforcements. The use of polymeric strips, also called geostrips, has increased in recent years because of their technical and economic advantages. Additionally, the type of selected soil as backfill ma-terial in reinforced earth is also preponderant for the internal stability of the structure. Usually, it is rec-ommended the use of granular materials, such as sands. Nowadays, many works can be found in literature about pull-out tests of these kinds of reinforcements, however there is a lack of information of studies on the interface resistance of reinforced lateritic soils, typical in tropical regions. The present research has studied the pullout resistance of polymeric strips in two different kinds of soils by means of large scaled laboratory pullout tests, aiming to study different soil-reinforcement interfaces. Based on the results, it was possible to quantify the pullout resistance of the polymeric strips, allowing the delimitation of design parameters.