Model Tests of Seismic Stability of Several Types of Soil Retaining Walls - Reinforced Soil Engineering: Advances in Research and Practice - page 329

Figure 17 Horizontal distribution of tensile forces in reinforcement layers for

reinforced soil retaining wall type 2.

of 80 cm and 45 cm, respectively, showed different behaviors from others. The
tensile force of the uppermost reinforcement was constantly large, showing a
reduction with approaching its tip, while the tensile force of the middle-height
reinforcement was very limited. These behaviors suggest that the extended
uppermost reinforcement mobilized the frictional resistance near its tip, while the
middle-height reinforcement that was extended to a lesser extent did not mobilize
the frictional resistance effectively. Such different degrees of mobilization of
frictional resistance may be linked to the different locations of these

reinforcements relative to the failure planes as typically shown in Fig. 9 .
If it can be assumed that the frictional angle at the interface between the
reinforcement and the backfill is equal to the simple shear peak friction angle of
the backfill, f ss ¼ arctan(t/s) max along a horizontal failure plane, which is

estimated to be 38 as shown later, the frictional resistance mobilized on both

sides of the reinforcement having a width of 3mm over its full length (

8

200mm;
refer to the hatched zone in Fig. 3 ) for reinforced soil type 1 will become about 0.8
N, 3.8 N, and 6.8 N for the uppermost, middle-height, and lowest reinforcements,

¼