Soil spatial variability impact on the behavior of a reinforced earth wall

This article presents the soil spatial variability effect on the performance of a reinforced earth wall. The serviceability limit state is considered in the analysis. Both cases of isotropic and anisotropic non-normal random fields are implemented for the soil properties. The Karhunen-Loève expansion method is used for the discretization of the random field. Numerical finite difference models are considered as deterministic models. The Monte Carlo simulation technique is used to obtain the deformation response variability of the reinforced soil retaining wall. The influences of the spatial variability response of the geotechnical system in terms of horizontal facing displacement is presented and discussed. The results obtained show that the spatial variability has an important influence on the facing horizontal displacement as well as on the failure probability.