LRFD Calibration of Metallic Reinforced Soil Walls

The paper is focused on key points and lessons learned from LRFD calibration of simple limit state functions for the internal stability of metallic reinforced soil walls. The example used in the paper is the ultimate pullout limit state for ribbed steel strip reinforced mechanical stabilized earth (MSE) walls and a single load due to soil self-weight plus a permanent surcharge load. The paper demonstrates how load and resistance measurements from instrumented walls and physical pullout tests can be used to generate bias values. Bias statistics are then used to a) improve the accuracy of underlying deterministic models used to compute nominal load and resistance values, b) remove hidden dependencies, c) select load factors, and d) calculate resistance factors to meet an acceptable probability of failure. While the paper is focused on the pullout limit state example, the model fitting approach and LRFD calibration methodology is applicable to a wide range of other soil-structure limit state design problems in geotechnical engineering.