Performance of an earth wall stabilized with bearing reinforcements

This article presents the performance of a fully instrumented test wall reinforced with bearing reinforcement. Bearing reinforcement is an inextensible earth reinforcement. It is composed of a longitudinal member and transverse members. The longitudinal member is a deformed steel bar and the transverse members are a set of equal steel angles. The test wall was 6 m high, 9 m long at the top, 6 m wide at the top, and 12 m long, 21 m wide at the base and was constructed on a hard stratum. The facing panels were made of segmental concrete block which measured 1.50 × 1.50 × 0.14 m in dimension. From the full-scale test results, the bearing stress distribution is a trapezoid shape as generally assumed for the examination of the external stability of MSE walls. The tilt of the bearing reinforcement earth (BRE) wall indicates that the BRE wall behaves as a rigid body. The coefficients of earth pressure decrease with depth and approach the active state at deeper reinforcement level. From the variation in the stiffness factor as a function of depth and lateral earth pressure, the bearing reinforcement has a stiffness factor of K/K_a = 1.7, which is much lower than that of steel grids and metal strips. The lower tension (coefficient of lateral earth pressure) reduces the cross-sectional area of the longitudinal members and hence cost effectiveness. The maximum tension line (possible failure plane) of the BRE wall is bilinear, similarly to the coherent gravity structure hypothesis, which is commonly used for the analysis of inextensible reinforcements. Finally, the suggested method of designing the BRE wall is presented. It has been successfully used to design several BRE walls founded on the hard stratum in different areas in Thailand.