Reliability Analysis of Geosynthetic-Reinforced Soil Segmental Wall Under the Constrain of Maximum Wall Face Displacement

Abstract eng:
The application of probabilistic concept has been pervaded in the analysis and design of geotechnical structures recently. For example, the reliability of stability for mechanically stabilized earth (MSE) walls has been studied. Instead of external and internal stability, this paper presents a study of reliability analysis of MSE wall targeting on the wall performance, explicitly the maximum wall face displacement. First, a numerical model for simulating a segment MSE wall is developed. This numerical mode is verified through a promising comparison with displacement and stress measurement as reported in Hatami and Bathurst (2005). A numerical experiment set consisting of 2970 simulations by varying design parameters including wall height, wall inclination, soil friction angle, stiffness of segments, extent of reinforcement, and magnitude of surcharge is then conducted. The database of maximum wall displacement under different combination of design parameters of MSE wall is regressed for the approximate equation between design parameters and dimensionless maximum wall displacement. The suitability of approximate equation is validated by a sound comparison with numerical simulation results. Two types of model uncertainties in the approximate equation against from numerical simulation results and from the measurement records are estimated. For both uncertainties, the magnitude of bias is about zero while the standard deviation is about 0.3. The format of approximate equation is simple enough for conducting Monte Carlo simulation. The reliability analysis of segmental MSE wall is demonstrated by charts showing reliability versus design parameters for different criteria of maximum normalized wall displacement.

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