PREDICTING THE EFFECT OF BOUNDARY FORCES ON THE BEHAVIOUR OF REINFORCED SOIL WALLS

Practical design methods for reinforced soil retaining walls are often based on limit-equilibrium methods of analysis. It is often found that displacements and reinforcement forces measured after wall construction are substantially lower than those implied in the design analysis. It is suggested that in order to make satisfactory predictions of wall behaviour it is necessary to include the effects of boundary forces which are not incorporated directly in the current design methods. A method of calculating displacements in reinforced soil walls in the absence of boundary forces is described and an analysis is developed in which the effect of boundary forces on the wall displacements is included. This analysis is used to discuss the effects of boundary forces on the measurements made during recent published reinforced soil wall tests. (A) For the covering abstract see IRRD 859983.