Abstract
Retaining walls mechanically stabilized with reinforcement frequently have proven their resilience while maintaining an advantage over conventional (gravity and cantilever) walls in terms of cost effectiveness and environmental impact. To achieve optimized design beyond the inherently conservative code specifications, reliable pullout models are needed. The paper enriches the existing literature with results from a series of laboratory pullout tests involving inextensible steel grid reinforcement (in the form of bar mat) embedded in dense sand. Comparative tests were used to determine the role in key response mechanisms of parameters such as the reinforcement width and the spacing of longitudinal and transverse elements. The dominant role of soil dilatancy was identified and its effect on the response of different grid configurations was interpreted by recourse to simple conceptual physical models. It was found that interference between zones of restrained dilatancy may be substantial enough to promote the use of coarser (and hence more economical) mesh configurations, especially at shallow depths. For the pullout factor in highly dilative soils, a closed-form expression is proposed which describes reasonably well the experimental results, and adequately captures the interrelated phenomena occuring in two directions, transverse and longitudinal.
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Data Availability Statement
All data, models, and code generated or used during the study appear in the published article.
Acknowledgments
The first author acknowledges financial support by the Greek State Scholarship Foundation (IKY Fellowships of Excellence for Postgraduate Studies in Greece—Siemens Program). The authors express their gratitude to VSL International, a member of Bouygues Construction, for their support in providing the steel grid reinforcements.The authors also are grateful to Benoit Chanteperdrix and Michalis Chikaras, who clarified a number of technical details regarding the VSoL reinforcement.
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Journal of Geotechnical and Geoenvironmental Engineering
Volume 146 • Issue 10 • October 2020
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© 2020 American Society of Civil Engineers.
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Received: Aug 6, 2019
Accepted: May 26, 2020
Published online: Jul 25, 2020
Published in print: Oct 1, 2020
Discussion open until: Dec 25, 2020
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