A New Method for Numerical Analysis of Reinforced Soil

There are two general approaches to the analysis of reinforced soil. One is to deal with the soil and the reinforcement separately, assuming that they interact with each other through friction on the interface between them. The other is to consider the reinforced soil as an anisotropic homogeneous composite, such that the forces of interaction between soil and reinforcement material become internal, something that does not appear in calculations of the stress and deformation of the composite. In this paper, a new method is proposed for the analysis of reinforced soil. The basic principle of this method is that only the soil skeleton is taken into account, while the reinforcing effect is considered as an equivalent additional stress acting on the soil skeleton in the direction of the reinforcement bedding. The existing constitutive model for soil can be directly used in this method without having to formulate new models. The procedures involved in the determination of the equivalent additional stress and other relevant parameters are also presented in the paper. Examples show that the new method can reasonably describe the stress strain relationship of fiber-reinforced soil and soil structures reinforced with layers of reinforcement.