Non-Destructive Methods for Assessing the Condition of Reinforcement Materials in Soil

A reinforced earth wall is a structure in which reinforcement materials are placed in an embankment to build a vertical or nearly vertical wall surface. Such walls have been widely used in roads and in developed land since around 1960. Reinforcement materials have a set service life of 100 years and fall into two types: steel and geosynthetics. To ensure long-term durability, steel reinforcement materials are plated, while geosynthetics are designed with a limit strength designed to resist fracture for 100 years under the conditions of a given load placed on the reinforcement materials. However, owing to the difficulty of assessing the condition of reinforcement materials in soil, this paper proposes solutions based on non-destructive methods. Specifically, it proposes a method of assessing the amount of strain through an embedded optical fiber in the case of geosynthetic reinforcement materials, or magnetic surveying to investigate the degree of corrosion in the case of steel reinforcement materials. This paper demonstrates that it is possible to non-destructively assess the state of either type of reinforcement material.