REINFORCING MECHANISMS AND A STABILITY ANALYSIS METHOD FOR REINFORCED EARTH STRUCTURES

抄録

This paper presents reinforcing mechanisms and a method for analyzing reinforced earth structures. The reinforcing mechanism presented is divided into two stages, a fixed slip surface and an arbitrarily selected slip surface. The mechanism is studied through direct shear tests and plane strain compression tests including some geotextiles. The reinforcing materials considered in this paper only have tensile strength. The authors have already proposed a method called Generalized Limit Equilibrium Method (GLEM) for analyzing stability problems. The validity of the method has already been shown in previously published papers. In this paper, the method is extended to carry out a stability analysis for reinforced earth structures. Finally, large scale model tests for the bearing capacity of foundations on reinforced slopes were carried out to investigate the validity of the proposed reinforcing mechanism and the analytical method. Through comparisons of observations of experiments and results of the analytical method, the validity of the present work is demonstrated.