Post-construction performance of a two-tiered geogrid reinforced soil wall backfilled with soil-rock mixture

There have been very few studies on the application of soil-rock mixtures as the backfills of geogrid reinforced soil retaining walls with due concern for their long-term performance and safety. In this study, a 17-m high two-tiered reinforced soil wall backfilled with soil-rock mixture was instrumented for its performance under gravity load after construction. The instrumentation continued for 15 months. It is found that soil-rock mixtures with small rock content (<30%) have the potential to be used as the backfill materials of geogrid-reinforced retaining walls, but special attentions should be given to compaction quality, backfill–geogrid interaction, and installation damage to geogrids. Reinforcement slippage is possible because of the large particles, but it was small in this case and ceased to develop nine months after the end of construction. Compressibility difference between reinforced and unreinforced backfill might led to rotation of the upper tier. Using the estimated soil strength, the predictions of reinforcement loads by the FHWA methods were 100% higher than the estimated ones from measured strains.