Capturing strain localization in reinforced soils

Lade’s single hardening soil model with Cosserat rotation embodied in the finite element method is employed to investigate the behavior of geosynthetic reinforced soils with special attention to the development of shear banding. The ability of the finite element model to detect shear banding in a reinforced soil is examined against three high quality small-scale laboratory plane strain tests on Toyoura sand with and without reinforcement. These three tests were chosen because of the clear failure surfaces that developed in the soil during loading. The FEM analyses were able to reasonably simulate the plane strain laboratory tests including both unreinforced and reinforced cases. The FEM analyses gave reasonably good agreement with the experimental results in terms of global stress–strain relationships and shear band occurrences. Furthermore, and based on FE analyses of a hypothetical geosynthetic reinforced soil (GRS) retaining wall, it is shown that the geosynthetic reinforcements are very effective in hindering the formation of shear bands in GRS retaining walls when small spacing between the reinforcement layers was used. When used properly, the geosynthetic reinforcements made the soil behave as a truly reinforced mass of considerable stiffness and strength.