NUMERICAL INVESTIGATION ON THE PERFORMANCE OF GEO-SYNTHETIC REINFORCED BRIDGE ABUTMENT: IN CASE OF BRIDGE No. 5 OF BABILE - FIK ROAD PROJECT

Over the last two decades, the Civil Engineering community have started to implement geo-synthetic-reinforced soil (GRS) bridge abutment as an alternative to bridges abutment with rigid foundation systems. As a result, the performance of GRS bridge abutment structures in terms of their lateral deformations during construction and operation is a topic of current interest in the community.
Material input data for Numerical Model of the GRS bridge abutment are adopted from a secondary resource.
A two-dimensional numerical analysis is conducted using MIDAS GTS-NX finite element program. Mohr-Coulomb, Modified Mohr-Coulomb, and Linear Elastic constitute models are used to model the foundation soil, backfill soil and the other materials (i.e., geo-synthetic, riprap and facing block), respectively. The loading conditions used in analysis are the dead loads of the approach road, the foundation and abutment.
By the end of the abutment construction, the maximum vertical deformation was measured to be 2.626mm and the lateral deformation was also measured as 0.64mm at the face of the abutment which indicates that the GRS bridge abutment is safe and the results are within the lower limit set by the Federal Highway Administration recommendations