Experimental study on performance of multi-tiered reinforced soil retaining walls

Current design of Geo synthetic-reinforced soil (GRS) walls, shows that the horizontal deformations in the walls increases rapidly with height. To take advantage of both the aesthetics and the economics of GRS walls while considering high heights, multi-tiered walls are often used. In this context, 12 models of the walls were constructed and their performance was determined under static loading. This study presents a series of model tests on the GRS walls in a tiered configuration, to evaluate the effects of factors, including the offset distance between adjacent tiers and number of tiers, on the lateral displacements of the wall facing and ultimate bearing capacities of the strip footings on the multi-tiered GRS walls. The ultimate bearing capacity and wall deflection can be significantly improved by increasing the number of tiers wall and increase of tier-offset. Interaction between the upper and lower walls significantly influences the tier-offset, and the interaction between the walls, significantly increase in the horizontal deformation in the wall face for the upper wall. With an increase in the offset distance, the lateral displacement decreased significantly, particularly in the upper tier. The experimental results showed that, the Performance in Four layers of reinforcement, and two tier walls, the optimum offset distance obtained for D/H= 0.35. When the offset becomes significantly large, each tier functions independently