Reinforced earth wall is designed to place the horizontal stiffener in the earth behind the re-taining wall to constrain the horizontal displacement as well as reduce the earth pressure on retaining wall. Reinforced earth wall was first introduced to Korea in early 1980s and has been used at the sites in line with the de-velopment of various geotextile stiffeners. Stiffener developed shall be incorporated into the design for reinforced earth wall after evaluating the deformation characteristics, damage during con-struction and a long-term durability and tensile strength. Then though development of reinforced earth wall is on the rise recently, safety verification for various methods remains behind which has caused the problems including collapse after installation. The stiffener used for reinforced earth wall is categorized into a strip-type, grid-type, sheet-type and cell-type, depending on their shape. Generally, a strip-type and grid-type are mostly used for permanent structure and A lug-type is known to have had a superior pullout resistance comparing to normal types. The stiffener is also categorized, depending on elasticity, into elas-tic stiffener and non-elastic stiffener and elastic stiffener has a superior pullout resistance than a non-elastic stiffener. To verify the performance of a pocket-lug-type geosynthetics developed in this study, comparative test was con-ducted using Geostrip and Geogrid and advantage/disadvantage was evaluated. The test to identify the pullout resistance and the damage during construction was conducted. Tensile strength of a pocket-lug-type geosynthetics developed in this study was relatively higher while the dam-age during construction was less. Consequently, a pocket-lug-type geosynthetics with less strength-reducing factor appeared to have had a superior performance and thus cost efficient design could be achieved.
Menu