Performance of a steel strip reinforced wall

The measured and calculated performance of a steel strip reinforced wall is reported. The wall was constructed by using the principle of reinforced earth ( Vidal 1969 ) with a length of 60 m and a maximum height of 12 m. The used reinforcement strips had a length of 10 m, and vertical and horizontal spacing of 0.75 m. The backfill material within reinforced soil mass was sandy gravel. The measured wall base settlement was less than 100 mm, and the lateral displacement at the top of the wall was about 15 mm at the end of the construction. The plane strain finite element method was used to analyze the behavior of the wall. The analysis results suggest that using the assumption of at rest earth pressure for design the retaining wall with very stiff reinforcement is reasonable. The location of the maximum tension force is close to the wall face and generally agreed with current design assumption. However, at working stress state, the active and passive zone in reinforced soil mass can not be clearly noticed. Also, the pull-out soil/reinforcement interaction pattern is not developed in most area and the interaction pattern between soil and reinforcement is controlled by the wall displacement pattern.