Journal of the Korean Geo-Environmental Society ISSN:1598-0820(Print) 2714-1233(Online) 한국지반환경공학회 논문집

The international trend in soil nailed wall design has been evolved from the allowable stress design to limit state design and it is still currently ongoing. The design guidelines in Korea and Hong Kong still adopts the allowable stress design philosophy while those in others mostly do the limit state design. In this study, four soil nail design methods presented in the major design guidelines (U.S. FHWA GEC 7 (2015), Clouterre in France (1991), Soil nailing - best practice guidance in U.K. (CIRIA, 2005), Geoguide 7 in Hong Kong (2008) and Design standard for slope reinforcement work in Korea (KDS 11 70 15 f: 2016)) are described and analyzed in brief. The factor of safety and CDR (Capacity-to-Demand Ratio) which is used to measure the degree of conservatism of a design guide are obtained for the two cases. One is the design example presented in CIRIA (2005) and the other is in—situ loading test performed on the top of backfill of the soil nail wall to investigate the conservatism of design guidelines. It is revealed that the design method in overall stability of soil nail walls in domestic design method (CDR=0.78) is the most conservative and those by Clouterre (CDR=0.99, 1.09), Geoguide 7 (CDR=1.13, 0.97), U.S. FHWA (CDR=1.09, 1.07) and CIRIA (CDR=1.40, 1.16) in order from the second most conservative to the least conservative for the design example presented in CIRIA. For the in—situ loading test performed on the top of backfill of the soil nail wall, the order of conservatism is identical except that the places of Geoguide 7 (CDR=0.66, 0.72) and FHWA (CDR=0.73, 0.72) are changed. However, the results obtained among U.S. FHWA (2015) and Clouterre (1991) and Geoguide 7 (2008) are not so different.