Structural Behavior of Prefabricated Ecological Grid Retaining Walls and Application in a Highway in China

The retaining wall is a common slope protection structure. To tackle the current lack of sustainable and highly prefabricated retaining walls, an environmentally friendly prefabricated ecological grid retaining wall with high construction efficiency has been developed. Due to the asymmetrical condition of the project considered in this paper, the designed prefabricated ecological grid retaining wall was divided into the excavation section and the filling section. By utilizing the ABAQUS finite element software, the stress and deformation characteristics of the retaining wall columns, soil, anchor rods, and inclined shelves in an excavation section, and the force and deformation relationships of the columns, rivets, and inclined shelves in three working conditions in a filling section were studied. The study results imply that the anchor rods may affect the columns in the excavation section and the stress at the column back changes in an M-shape with height. Moreover, the peak appears at the contact point between the column and the anchor rod. The displacement of the column increases slowly along with the height, and the column rotates at its bottom. In the excavation section, the stress of the anchor rod undergoes a change at the junction of the structure. The inclined shelf is an open structure and is very different from the retaining plate structure of traditional pile-slab retaining walls. Its stress distribution follows a repeated U-shaped curve, which is inconsistent with the trend of the traditional soil arching effect between piles, which increases first and then decreases. For the retaining wall structure in the filling section, the numerical simulated vehicle load gives essentially consistent results with the effects of the equivalent filling on the concrete column.