Experimental and upper-bound study of the influence of soilbag tail length on the reinforcement effect in soil slopes

Abstract Soilbags have good reinforcement effect on soil slopes. In this paper, traditional soilbag is modified by adding a tail to it. Model tests have been used to study the influence of soilbag tail length on the reinforcement effect in soilbags reinforced slopes. Moreover, a permissive failure pattern and a corresponding velocity field have been established based on the experimental results. Then, the ultimate failure heights of the reinforced slopes are obtained by using the upper-bound solution theory and compared with the experimental results. Both the experimental and analytical results show that within a certain limit, the reinforcement effect improves with the increase of tail length. However, when the tail length is over a certain value, the increase of the tail length does not improve the reinforcement effect any more. This provides theoretical basis to the optimized design of soilbags reinforced slopes.