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Numerical simulation of soil nailed retaining systems with geosynthetic reinforcement as the facing support

This research numerically examines the stability of a bridge abutment reinforced with grouted nail with geosynthetic facing in service and ultimate load states. Recently, soil-nailing technique has become a widely accepted method to efficiently reinforce the in-situ earth retaining systems. Alt-hough, the face of the retaining systems is very often supported by reinforced concrete elements, recent advancements in geosynthetic reinforcements have shown a potential to use geogrid as the face support for earth retaining structures. However, using different types of reinforcing elements in a single system results in complex soil-reinforcement interactions. With advancements in computational capacities, nu-merical simulation methods have become popular to assess the performance and the stability of geostruc-tures. Despite the popularity of the computational methods for geosynthetic reinforced systems, there is still a debate on appropriate type of elements to simulate reinforcing members and their effects on the numerical predictions. The main difference between the various types of numerical elements (i.e. beam and geogrid elements) is considering the contribution of bending and shear resistances of nails and face support elements to the deformability and stability of retaining system. Several studies indicated that ig-noring the influence of bending and shear resistances result in slight conservatism. However, the influ-ence of such assumptions on the global ultimate stability of the system and safety factor has not received sufficient attention. Therefore, this research aims at evaluation of numerical results for retaining soil structures reinforced by grouted nail and geosynthetic materials under service and ultimate loads for a complex system that consists of pile, grouted nails and geogrid face support.