Geosynthetic Reinforced Soil (GRS) Walls

Preface

Since the reintroduction of reinforced soil in the early 1960s, many innovative reinforced soil wall systems have been developed to deal with earthwork construction where an abrupt change in grade is desired or needed. Reinforced soil wall systems deploy horizontal layers of tensile inclusion in the fill material to improve or achieve stability. These wall systems have demonstrated many distinct advantages over their conventional counterparts such as cantilever reinforced concrete earth retaining walls, gravity concrete walls, crib walls, etc. In addition to high load‐carrying capacity, reinforced soil walls are typically more ductile (hence less susceptible to sudden collapse), more flexible (hence more tolerant to differential settlement), faster and easier to construct, more adaptable to low quality backfill, require less over‐excavation, more economical to construct, and have lower life‐cycle maintenance costs. To date, reinforced soil walls are being constructed at a rate of over 100,000 m² (in terms of total face area) annually in the U.S. alone.

Modern technologies of reinforced soil walls incorporate metallic strips/mats or synthetic polymeric sheets (termed geosynthetics) as tensile inclusion in the backfill during fill placement. Reinforced soil walls have commonly been designed by considering tensile inclusion as quasi‐tieback elements to stabilize the fill material through soil‐reinforcement interface bonding, and are collectively referred to as mechanically ...