Introduction

Reinforced earth walls or Mechanically Stabilized Earth (MSE) walls are gravity retaining structures built with earth and some form of reinforcement. Their construction involves placing alternating layers of soil and reinforcement, connected to front facing panels. The reinforcement can be metal strips, steel grids, or geosynthetic materials, like geogrid or geofabric. The soil within the wall itself is usually engineered granular material.

This example demonstrates the use of SLOPE/W to check the internal stability of reinforced earth walls. From a stability analysis perspective, the concepts are very similar to analyzing the stability of anchored tie-back walls or soil nail walls, where the reinforcement simply becomes a concentrated line load. However, for these structures, the bond or shear resistance between the soil and the rein