System reliability analysis of geogrid reinforced retaining wall using random finite element method

Abstract

Stabilizing earthwalls is extremely important in geotechnical engineering projects and has become an integral part of transportation infrastructures. Meanwhile, geogrid reinforced retaining walls have been the attention of designers due to their advantages. On the other hand, the soil heterogeneity and the requirement of investigating the internal (geogrid rupture and geogrid pullout) and external (global and lateral displacement) stability modes of these structures have necessitated performing system reliability analysis. In this study, finite element in conjunction with random fields is used to evaluate the reliability of these walls. For this purpose, a finite element program is coded in MATLAB to obtain internal and external safety factors considering staged construction. The deterministic program is extended to a stochastic framework to account for spatial variability of soil parameters in retained backfill, foundation soil, and reinforced fill. In the last part of this study, reliability indices of stability modes are calculated to obtain the series system reliability index, utilizing the Sequential Compounding Method (SCM). The results indicated that the effect of soil heterogeneity is more significant on internal stability modes compared to external stability modes especially geogrid pullout. The results of the system reliability analysis demonstrated more critical conditions thus the reliability index of the system was less than the reliability index of individual components.