Long-term behavior of GRS retaining walls with marginal backfill soils

The creep of geosynthetics leads to the increase of Geosynthetic-Reinforced Soil (GRS) wall's deformation. More importantly, the influences of creep of geosynthetics are also affected by the creep properties of soils. In this paper, a Finite Element procedure was validated against a model test on the creep response of a clay–geotextile composite. An extensive parametric study was then carried out to investigate the long-term response of 8-meter-high model GRS walls with marginal backfill soils. The influences of backfill creep, reinforcement creep, reinforcement stiffness, reinforcement length and reinforcement spacing were analyzed. A long-term analysis was conducted for 5 years and the results at the end of construction (EOC) and 5 years afterwards were compared. It is found from the analysis that the relative creep rate between geosynthetic reinforcement and backfill soil influenced not only wall deformation but also reinforcement loads and stress states in the soils. The load distribution in backfill soil and reinforcement is the result of battling between their time-dependent properties. Large reinforcement creep can lead to large post-construction deformation and increase in soil stress; on the other hand, large soil creep can induce a significant increase in reinforcement load. It is hence necessary to take into account the relative creep rate of reinforcement and backfill soil in the design of GRS walls. It may not be adequate to consider only the long-term strength of reinforcement, which is the state-of-the-practice at present.