Limit Analysis of Stability of Geosynthetics Reinforced Road Embankment

For studying effects of reinforcement distribution modes and distribution density on the stability of the road embankment, the upper-bound method of the limit analysis was employed to compute the critical height of the reinforced soil slope. In analysis, the rigid body rotational failure mechanism was adopted and the failure mode of the reinforcement was assumed to be its own tensile failure. Three types of reinforcement distribution modes, i.e., uniform mode, linearly increasing density mode and linearly decreasing density mode, were considered. With the same average reinforcement density, the critical height of the slope is the maximum for the linearly increasing density mode of reinforcement, and it is the minimum for the linearly decreasing density mode. So it's suggested that reinforcement distribution density in the lower position of the slope should be increased appropriately. For the three types of reinforcement distribution modes, the critical heights all increase obviously with the increase of average reinforcement distribution density. By comparison, the critical heights from upper-bound method were found to be in good agreement with the results of centrifuge model tests.