Efficient Reliability-Based Design Tool for Reinforced Earth Retaining Walls of Heavy Haul Railway Considering Internal Failure Modes

This paper presents the development and demonstration of an efficient reliability-based tool for the reinforced earth retaining wall design in heavy haul railway. Here, two major internal failure modes, rupture and pullout, are the focus in the demonstration. The First-Order Reliability Method (FORM) is adopted to estimate the probability of failure for each failure mode, and is implemented in a spreadsheet. The reliability analysis is conducted with the consideration of the effect of uncertainty in the reinforcement length, horizontal and vertical spacing between steel strips, tensile strength of steel strips as well as the material property of the backfills. Using this design tool, a few candidate designs can be easily obtained by meeting the acceptable probability of failure and the final design is determined based on cost. The results obtained using FORM are also verified by comparing with those from Monte Carlo simulation. This design tool is shown to be simple to use in the retaining wall design of the railway engineering.