Geofoam: A potential for Indonesia's soil problem III - Stabilizing retaining wall

Abstract

Increasing elevation of ground level is a common necessity in the construction world. For steep inclination, a retaining system is necessary to retain the soil embankment. When the embankment height is high, the required dimensions for the retaining wall can become humongous. This will result in excessive use of concrete, hence higher carbon footprint for the construction. To enable high retaining wall to be built without the support of huge retaining wall, light-weight backfill materials, such as geofoam can be used. In this paper, the use of geofoam to stabilize an eleven metre high retaining wall is presented. The eleven metre high retaining wall was filled with soil up to seven metre high, when cracks started to form in the retaining wall. Analysis show that failure would occur if the embankment continue to be filled. By replacing three metres out of the leftover four metres embankment with geofoam, the displacement of the retaining wall can be reduced from 2.1 m to 0.1 m.