Lateral Response Analysis of GRS Bridge Abutments under Passive Push

Abstract

The objective of this study is to analyse the response of Geosynthetic Reinforced Soil (GRS) bridge abutments under lateral push towards the backfill. Hypoplastic constitutive model is adopted as the user defined material model in the subroutine, VUMAT, to represent the soil behaviour in finite element (FE) analysis. The unreinforced abutment and GRS abutments of eighteen different configurations are modelled using FE approach and analysed for static passive push. The passive force-displacement curves are obtained to study the lateral response of the GRS abutments. The inclusion of geogrid reduced the passive pressures behind the abutment wall. The GRS abutments with lesser geogrid spacing and longer geogrid reduced the passive pressures significantly compared to the other cases studied.