CALCULATION OF THE CRITICAL HEIGHT OF A HOMOGENIZED REINFORCED SOIL WALL - A NUMERICAL APPROACH

This paper is devoted to the stability analysis of a vertical embankment in reinforced soil, assuming that a very large number of reinforcements are periodically distributed throughout the soil mass. The reinforced soil is modelled as a homogeneous medium that obeys a macroscopic yield condition. Two numerical formulations of the homogenized problem, derived from the lower and upper bound theorems of limit analysis, respectively, with a finite element discretization technique, are described. They both lead to a linear programming problem, which is carried out by means of XPRESS industrial LP code. The practical implementation of both the static and kinematic finite element programs on the case of a vertical reinforced earth wall results in close estimates of its failure height, which are in good agreement with available experimental data. This points to the ability of such programs to provide a rigorous evaluation of the limit loads of structures through the determination of lower bound and upper bound estimates sufficiently close to each other.