NUMERICAL MODELING OF REINFORCED EARTH WALLS: INFLUENCE OF SOIL CONSTITUTIVE MODELS ON STRUCTURAL BEHAVIOR AND DISPLACEMENT

In geotechnical engineering, reinforced soil walls are preferred due to their economical advantage and versatility. Nonetheless, the determination of the structural response of reinforced soil walls under different loading states remains a challenge, especially concerning the selection of an adequate soil constitutive model. This paper describes the development of a two-dimensional computational model capable of examining the effect of soil constitutive models on the structural response of reinforced soil walls. This study utilized a precise simulation of the design process, combining the results with soil parameters obtained through experiments. Two soil constitutive models are considered: the Mohr-Coulomb (MC) model, which is a linear elastic-perfectly plastic model widely used in geotechnical engineering, and the Cap-Yield (CYsoil) soil constitutive model, which captures the soil nonlinearity and stress-dependent stiffness. Results reveal the significant effect of the soil constitutive models on the general response of the structure, including the soil displacement field. Specifically, the MC soil model, which simplifies the shear strength of the soil, overestimates the soil stiffness, predicting lower soil displacements. On the contrary, the CYsoil soil model, which captures the soil nonlinearity, stress-dependent stiffness, and plastic volumetric strains, provides predictions of larger soil displacements. The obtained results highlight the role of selecting a suitable soil model in designing reinforced earth structures. This work has shown that including non-linear soil behavior improves simulation accuracy in numerical modeling for geotechnical problems