Embankments over soft soils

Reinforced Earth offers engineered solutions for the construction of embankments using geosynthetic reinforcements.

An embankment is an engineered earth fill that forms a raised structure. The structure consists of two side slopes and a core of the same fill material, generally comprised of non-cohesive soils. The stability of an embankment constructed on soft soil is governed mostly by the shearing resistance of the foundation. This condition challenges engineers to properly address and mitigate the lack of adequate bearing capacity below the embankment. Reinforced Earth geosynthetic reinforcements provide engineers and builders with a cost-effective solution to assure long-term stability of built embankments by controlling settlement and deformation.

The Reinforced Earth solution utilizes standard geotechnical practices to integrate strong unidirectional geosynthetic geogrids engineered to bear heavy static and dynamic loads. Embankments constructed with a single layer of our high strength geosynthetics can improve safety factors against sudden failures, decrease the need for specialized equipment, and make the process of construction streamlined and rapid. Also, in some cases these structures can reduce the footprint needed to construct a stable embankment using traditional methods while narrowing the right of way inroads.

Applications and advantages

These earth structures can be designed to increase the elevation of a road, railroad, airport, or to hold and control water. In addition to transportation projects, embankments over soft soil can enhance the performance and stability of levees, channels, canals and many other hydraulic works applications.

Our solution offers several advantages when compared to traditional methods such as excavation and replacement, displacement, desiccation, progressive displacement, chemical stabilization, and others. These conventional geotechnical approaches are typically more costly to build due to requiring careful construction staging and specialized equipment.

The case of an embankment on soft soil reinforced with geosynthetics provides additional stability to the embankment by preventing possible slips from occurring. Even if the foundation soils are not incredibly soft, the use of geosynthetics under the embankment will increase the service life of the structure by providing permanent benefits such as separation of materials, enhanced drainage, and permanent reinforcement for the structure.