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An instrumented reinforced earth wall
Faisal Ali* and Lee Chee Hai
Department of Civil Engineering, University of Malaya, 50603
Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.
*Corresponding author. E-mail:
fahali@um.edu.my.
Accepted 4 June, 2010 |
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Reinforced earth wall system has become very popular because
of its aesthetic value and ease of construction. In order to
optimize the design, it is important to understand its
behavior during and after construction. This can be achieved
either through field instrumentation or numerical
simulation. In this paper, field instrumentation work
carried out on a reinforced earth wall is described with the
objective of capturing the essential behaviour of the wall
during and after construction. Two different wall conditions
were considered, that is, in the first case, the wall is
allowed to move laterally and in the other case the wall is
not flexible in transverse direction. Based on the
observations made, it can be concluded that the locus of
maximum tension is a vertical line offset approximately
0.35H away from the facing. For lateral pressure, it is seen
that the curve for the flexible facing follows similar trend
as the curve for the rigid facing except that the horizontal
pressure at the flexible facing is generally slightly lower.
Lastly, the connection ratio at rigid facing is generally
higher than the connection ratio at the flexible facing.
Key words:
Reinforced earth, instrumentation, anchor blocks, lateral
movement. |
