Hydraulic and earth engineering – Earth treatment or control – Rock or earth bolt or anchor
Patent
1999-02-03
2000-02-01
Taylor, Dennis L.
Hydraulic and earth engineering
Earth treatment or control
Rock or earth bolt or anchor
405284, 405286, E02D 2900
Patent
active
060195509
DESCRIPTION:
BRIEF SUMMARY
BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION
This invention relates to a retaining wall construction, suitable for use in civil engineering soil reinforcement, of the type comprising a wall built from staggered superimposed courses of modular blocks anchored to a reinforcement material, preferaby a geogrid.
Reinforcement materials are well known in civil engineering construction work, to stabilise a reinforce large volumes of soil, such as embankments, terracing and landfill. They are usually lid horizontally between layers of compacted soil infill, with the vertical spacing between successive layers normally increasing from the bottom to the top of the infill. The reinforcement material can take many forms but is typically a mesh, grid, net or perforated sheet made from a non-biodegradable material, such as various plastics or metal wire, and in particular one of the woven or integral polymeric grids known as geogrids.
Although the present invention is not limited to the use of any specific type of reinforcement material, of particular interest are geogrids made by stretching a sheet of plastics material (such as high density polyethylene) having a pattern of holes formed therein, so as to produce a rectangular mesh with parallel spaced-apart molecularly-oriented strands interconnected by transverse bars. Such geogrids are described, for example, in the specifications of U.S. Pat. No. 4,374,798, British Patent 2 073 090 and British Patent 2 235 899, and are available commercially under the Trademark "TENSAR".
For brevity, the term "geogrid" will generally be used herein, to denote the reinforcement material employed in the invention. However, this term should be understood also to cover other forms of flexible strip or sheet-like material suitable for use in soil reinforcement, such as woven or non-woven textiles, webs or sheets, providing that these materials posess the strenghth and other properties needed for the intended use and are capable of interacting correctly with the other elements of the invention, as described below.
In many types of soil reinforcement construction, it is necessary to provide a retaining wall along at least one side of the infill, for instance to prevent erosion. Such a wall may be constructed from superimposed courses of loose-laid modular blocks, with staggered joins between the blocks in successive courses, in the conventional manner. The modular blocks may conveniently be pre-cast on or off site from unreinforced or mass concrete, preferably to a size allowing for easy handling without the use of cranes or other heavy lifting gear. The wall may be straight or curved along its length, by using blocks of an appropiate design, and may be vertical or with a batter (i.e. its face may slope backwards from bottom to top).
A retaining wall of this kind must be able to withstand the considerable pressure of of the soil infill behind it, and this can be done by anchoring it to the substantially horizontal geogrid material buried between the layers of the infill. As the construction proceeds, the wall is built up from courses of the modular blocks, an the soil infill is added behind it and compacted. Layers of the geogrid material are laid horizontally over the compacted soil, at appropiate vertical intervals, and anchored to the wall. The process is then repeated until the final height is achieved. The vertical spacing between the layers of geogrid is often greater than the height of the blocks, so that two or more courses of blocks will frequently be laid between successive layers of geogrid.
Various designs of retaining wall and methods for anchoring a geogrid to the retaining wall have been proposed in the past; but these have generally suffered from various disadvantages, such as not providing adequate strength of anchoring, not providing anchoring evenly along the major part of the interface between the geogrid and the wall, or not being readily usable with curved retaining walls.
Thus, in one type of construction, for example as described in European Patent Specification 0 472 993, the edge
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Dobie Michael John David
Wrigley Nigel Edwin
Nelton Limited
Taylor Dennis L.
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