Design of MSE - Mechanically Stabilized

{Earth, Embankments, Environments}

A reinforced embankment consists of several parts, the wall or facing structure, the reinforcing media and the soil. For a wall to be stable,
all three parts must work together.

The facing can be rigid, such as steel or concrete panels, heavy timbers, or concrete masonry units, or it can be flexible, made from the
fabric, grid, wire mesh or gabion type structures.

An early form of MSE wall is a gabion, or rock basket. Developed by Maccaferri in the 1886, the first woven metal rock basket was
round and used as a protection for failing slope. Parts of the original wall still exist. They later patented the box gabion, which is widely
used today.

The first pictures are located on Fall River Road at Rocky Mountain National Park.

Box Gabions About 3 feet Tall, 3 feet Deep and 8 feet Long.

The new wall on the left, the Note the grass stand that has developed in the old
old wall on the right. wall.

An example closer to home is under Grand Avenue, next to the old Walmart store.

This is a four layer high wall. It acts as a

retaining wall for the road, provides drainage
for a small spring under it and provides
erosion protection for the creek.
Each basket is wired with one reinforcing Each basket comes flat, is folded up into the box, filled with rock and then wired to the
frame in the center and wire loops at the next basket and the one below.
quarter lengths.

The front face takes on a rather "organic" bulge so it doesn't seem quite so rigid. The back
of the wall is place against a sheet of geotextile to prevent the soil from entering into the
back (the coarse rock makes an excellent drain, but not a good filter .)

There are also rock blankets or mats for erosion control. A very versatile product, it is very labor intensive to place the rock inside the
basket.

Reinforced Earth
The oldest and best known MSE is Reinforced Earth. The first Reinforced Earth project in Wyoming is a highway overpass over the
Burlington-Northern Railroad tracks in Lusk. Instead of having to slope the embankment at a 3:1 slope, the RE walls are vertical. In fact,
notice the side of the building to the left of the picture. It is an old Power company building. The highway is able to pass within about 8
feet from the building. (Of course, the view from the building's east windows is really poor.)
Some retaining walls under construction at the I25-I225 interchange at T-Rex in Denver.
The walls are being used for both vertical embankments and as tunnel walls.

Alternative Constructions
There are many possible alternatives for this design. For example, the facing can be of concrete, metal or geotextile/geogrid. Instead of
strapping, geotextile, chain link fencing, geogrid, etc., may be used.
 Basic Design Considerations
Like all retaining walls, the MSE wall must be stable against external failures, such as sliding, rotation, bearing capacity, settlement, etc.
In addition, they must be internally stable, such that the stresses are not so great as to pull the straps out of the embankment or that the
stress cause the straps to yield in tensile strength.

I refer to this procedure as basic because it hits all the principles but neglects some of the more advanced reductions. Hence, it tends to
overestimate stresses and lengths, which should provide a design with a higher factor of safety.

Force Acting on Back of Wall

The effective area on the back of the panel is given by SvW.

The force F acting the back of the panel is given by

This force is balanced by the force acting in the reinforcement attached to the back of the wall. There is still some question whether to
use "at rest" stresses, Ko, or "active" stresses, Ka, although most of the literature I've read recently uses active. At rest conditions give the
most conservative design and are used here. Other loading conditions (for example, the bridge girder loading beam) can be handled in a
manner similar to the surface stress, q, above. I doubt that the difference between active and at-rest conditions is probably less than 5-
10%.

Two conditions must be accounted for, breaking of the straps (applied stress greater than the yield strength of the strap) and pullout of the
straps (applied stress greater than the shear strength developed on the face of the strap by the soil).

Resistance to Reinforcement Yielding

The stress acting in the reinforcement will be equal to the force acting on the back of the wall divided by the area (or length, for
geotextiles) of the reinforcements.

For Straps:

where σ straps is the actual stress on the reinforcement and σ yield is the maximum allowable stress in the reinforcing material, b is the
width of the reinforcing, t is the thickness and nstraps is the number of straps being stressed in the loaded area. This is usually 4 for steel
straps or fiber webbing and 1or 2 for geotextiles and geogrids. Equating the forces and solving for FS gives the factor of safety for the
straps against yield failure.

The factor of safety should be 2.5 to 3.0 or greater.

One of the greatest concerns about the straps is that they should not corrode under normal operating conditions. Steel straps should be
galvanized or epoxy coated, or non-metalic straps may be used. In this regard, its better to use thicker and narrower straps rather than
thinner and wider, so that you have more depth to counter corrosion.

Strap Length
There are two parts for determining strap length. First, the embedment length, Le, should be long enough to develop sufficient friction
from the soil so that the strap won't pull out. Second, the embedment length must extend beyond the failure zone, Lr, (normally assumed
to be the Rankine failure line). That is,
The length of embedment is a function of the force, F, the soil and the type of strap. Looking at the strap, the pullout force must be
balanced by the friction generated on the strap by the soil.

or

Equating that force for all of the straps to the force on the back of the wall gives

and solving for L gives

This length has to extend beyond the Rankine failure zone, Lr.

Note that Lr changes at every depth while Le is constant. For short walls, it is customary to use the top length of strap for the full depth
of the wall. This provides additional support against pullout and also reduces setup costs and lessens chances for error. As a rule of
thumb, the total length normally falls at about L = 0.7H.
Geotextiles:

Lift height of a geotextile wall is determined from

There is one active layer in tension in geotextiles and geogrids, and the width of the fabric b is equal to the width of the wall, W. The
strength of the fabric is given in terms of force/length, or . These give

The fabric strength is published in the "Geotechnical Fabrics Report - Specifiers Guide." For example, Nicolon Mirafi Group HP550 has
a Wide Width Tensile Strength of 11 kN/m at 5% strain. (Notice it has 11kN/m in both directions, it doesn’t have to be the same and
most are not.)

For example, if the backfill for an embankment is sand, d = 8 m, , Ko = 0.40 and the Factor of Safety is 2, then the
maximum spacing between layers of fabric would be

or about 4 inches.

Normally, you probably want to go thicker than that, so select an HP570 with a tensile strength of 35 kN/m in both directions. This gives

or 12 inches, use 0.3 m.

Note that the spacing decreases with depth. In staged design, the wall height is divided into 2 or 3 stages and the layer thickness, Sv, is
calculated at the bottom of each stage.

Now we have the depth of layer selected. The next step is to determine the length of the fabric. There are two parts, the embedment
length, Le, and the Rankine length, Lr. The embedment length must be beyond the failure surface of the Rankine failure wedge. The
embedment length is found by equating the force on the back of the wall to the shear force acting on the area of the fabric.
 is the friction angle between the fabric and the sand. A common approximation is = . The 2 in this relationship comes from

having two shear surfaces having individual areas of . This is a function of depth only in terms of the spacing Sv. Thus, each stage
will have an embedment length. This value is usually somewhat small, i.e., often less than a meter.

This length has to extend beyond the Rankine failure zone, Lr.

The Rankine length is greater higher up, so it is usually calculated at the top of the stage.

The total length in each stage L is the sum of the upper Rankine Length and the Embedment Length calculated for that stage. For the

upper stage, it is common to check the length by the rule of thumb of .

The upper wrap length just needs to stay in place and can be in the Rankine zone. The minimum wrap length is given by Le. This is often
very short and so a common minimum wrap length is 1 to 1.5 meters. The end should be wrapped back into the embankment and buried
to lock it into place.

In addition, the external stability of the wall should be checked. This includes the factor of safety against sliding, overturning, bearing
capacity and rotational failure.