Issue and Nonissue in Block Walls as Implied Through Computer-Aided Design - Reinforced Soil Engineering: Advances in Research and Practice - page 82

Issue and Nonissue in Block Walls
as Implied Through Computer-Aided
Design
Dov Leshchinsky
University of Delaware, Newark, Delaware, U.S.A.
1 INTRODUCTION
The Reinforced Earth Company introduced commercial modular wall systems
during the 1960s. Both the performance and economics of these reinforced walls
made them popular. These walls consisted of large modular precast facing units
connected to metallic strips at predetermined vertical and horizontal intervals to
produce a coherent reinforced soil system that is both externally and internally
stable. During the late 1970s, geosynthetic wall systems were introduced in
secondary applications and, during the 1980s, in major applications. The success
of the metal strip reinforced wall system resulted in a direct adaptation of its
proven design method to geosynthetic walls.
The Federal Highway Administration's Demonstration Project 82 (Elias
and Christopher, 1997), also known as Demo 82, provides design guidelines for a
variety of mechanically stabilized earth (MSE) walls. It introduces the same
computational scheme for all wall systems, including metallic and polymeric
reinforcement, using empirical parameters to adjust for the specific properties of
each system. Conducting parametric and comparative studies following Demo 82
using hand calculations is tedious. However, utilization of program MSEW
(1998), developed as a companion for Demo 82, makes such studies easy and
instructive.