Field Performance of a Full-Scale Retaining Wall Reinforced with Nonwoven Geotextiles

Retaining walls in Brazil have often been reinforced using nonwoven geotextiles instead of other reinforcement inclusions such as geogrids, woven geotextiles, and metallic reinforcements. This approach has several advantages such as ease of construction, expediency, and significant cost reduction. However, current lack of field data on the field performance of nonwoven geotextile-reinforced structures, mainly regarding displacements, has prevented their utilization in critical structures. Observation of the behavior of full-scale structures and a further characterization of the materials are needed to gain understanding of the behavior of nonwoven geotextile-reinforced soil structures. Accordingly, a series of nonwoven geotextile-reinforced soil structures was built and instrumented to analyze their behavior. This paper presents the results of a full-scale field monitoring program and associated finite element analyses conducted for a nonwoven geotextile-reinforced soil wall. The results show that current design methods provide conservative evaluation of the overall stability of the structure. The results of the numerical simulation indicate that FEM is a useful tool to predict the response of structures reinforced with geosynthetics. Monitoring results were found to be in agreement with those obtained in the numerical simulation.