An experimental program involving the construction and monitoring of large-scale geosynthetic-reinforced soil walls has been under way at the royal military college (rmc) of canada for several years. Several 3-m-high model walls have been built within the rmc retaining wall test facility and these walls taken to failure under uniform surcharge loading. The instrumentation, calibration of equipment, data acquisition, and monitoring strategies that have been developed over the course of this program are described. Examples of qualitative features of model wall behavior during construction, under workingload conditions, and at incipient collapse are given. These examples highlight the success of the instrumentation program to date. Thispaper appears in transportation research record no. 1277, Modern geotechnical methods: instrumentation and vibratory hammers 1990.
Abstract