Experimental study of geocell and geogrid pullout resistance in rockfall protection reinforced soil walls

Abstract

Rockfall protection reinforced soil walls have been increasingly constructed in recent years as structures to protect road traffic from falling rocks. This structure uses steel facing unit to maintain the shape of the reinforced soil wall, but we replaced the specifications from the steel facing unit to geocell made of high-density polyethylene to reduce the environmental impact. And We conducted a pull-out test of the geocell and geogrid connections. For the connections, we tried a structure in which the geogrid was simply sandwiched between geocells, and a structure in which fixed piles were inserted. In this paper, we provide an overview of the experiment, provide a detailed description of the structure of the connections, and report on the pull-out strength of the connections obtained in the experiment.