Introduction

Maccaferri S.p.A. designed and built a mechanically stabilized earth (MSE) wall reaching a height of 40 m in Albania. The large height was achieved using rock-faced reinforced soil walls in combination with geogrid reinforcement.

This example demonstrates the use of SLOPE/W to check the global and internal stability of the MSE wall. Specifically, the objectives of this case study are to: 1) demonstrate the usage of the Maccaferri reinforcement library in SLOPE/W; 2) illustrate the method for analyzing a two-component MSE wall (i.e. rock wall with geogrid); and, 3) systematically analyze different modes of failure.

Note that this example is for demonstration purposes only as no attempt is made to verify the analysis against real-world behaviour. Maccaferri conducted the actual analysis and