FINE-GRAINED INFLUENCE ON THE BEHAVIOR OF REINFORCED SAND WALLS UNDER SURCHARGE LOAD USING CENTRIFUGE

Modern methods of reinforcing walls were used in the 60sby Henry Vidal. Reinforced soil wall is an alternative toretaining walls and traditional embankments. The useof geosynthetics as reinforcement in reinforced soil wallshas been signi cant in recent years. Reinforced soil wallshave been used in Iran since 70s. Accordingly,in someareas, due to the lack of access to suitable materialsand high cost of material supply from far zones, ne-grained soils may be used for wall back ll. Reinforcedslopes and walls come with various applications, includ-ing its use in bridge abutment. In this study, the e ectof ne-grained soils, strip surcharge, and wall angle onbehavior of geosynthetic reinforced soil walls using cen-trifuge modeling has been studied. In this study, a set of8 centrifuge testes on saturated ne-grained walls rein-forced with geotextile was performed using the geotech-nical research center of Iran University of Science andTechnology centrifuge, and behavior of physical modelsusing digital image processing technique was studied.The comparison between place of rupture on geotextileand slid surface obtained from digital image processingwas a good matched. Therefore, combination of cen-trifuge modeling with digital image processing is a goodway to study the behavior of geosynthetic reinforced soilwalls.The results showed that with increasing load of stripfooting, the amount settlements of top of wall increased,and this e ect on vertical walls is more than the batteredwalls. Moreover, stains of reinforced layers and defor-mation of facing wall also increase when nes in back llincreased from %10 to %20. It was observed that slidesurfaces were entry from behind of strip footing and de-veloped to the toe of the walls. With increasing percentof ne-grained in back ll from %10 to %20, sliding sur-faces were deeper. In addition, with the decreasing ofangle of face, the models were stable. In addition, exis-tence of %10 nes in sand back ll improves performanceof geosynthetic reinforced soil wall (GRSW). If nes inthe back ll increased to %20, GRSW would have poorperformance.