There is a neat little blurb in Roads and Bridges magazine on a small mechanically stabilized earth (MSE) retaining wall at NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility on the Coast of Virginia. The wall was designed and supplied by the Reinforced Earth Company (RECo) back in 2011. Although the wall is only 10 feet high supporting a bridge abutment, it is the route that the Antares Rockets take to reach the launch pad and eventually blast off to resupply the International Space Station. Design challenges for the wall included possible inundation with seawater, extreme live loading, and very thorough QA/QC by NASA and their designees. The live loads were 1,500 psf or about 6 times the normal highway live loading! Read more in Roads and Bridges Magazine.
Related Articles
TRB Webinar: Updates to MSE Retaining Wall Design Procedures
ADAMA Software Updates – MSEW and ReSSA
ADAMA Software has released several updates to their popular MSE Wall design software and Reinforced Soil Slope software packages. Update 9 to MSEW 3.0 was posted on April 25. The changes include several updates related to the AASHTO 2007 code, and the option to use either the Simplified Method (AASHTO) or the Coherent Gravity Method (CGM). And there is now an option for considering live load (LL) in calculating Tmax for strength and connection but ignoring it for pullout.
Update 2.2 to ReSSA 3.0 was posted yesterday, May 5 after several itterations of the update were posted during the month of April. The update includes a fix for handling geometries where multiple points have the same X-coordinate but different Y-coordinates. It also allows for the specification of a vertical seismic coefficient as well as a horizontal one. And the latest updates allow the inclusion of the safety map in the printout, include modified calculations of reinforcement quantities, and allow user-selected colors for reinforcement layers that now shows up in the printout too. Click through for the download link.
The Ultimate Geotechnical Engineering Challenge
Most people are aware that Apollo 11 was the NASA where man first set foot on the Moon. But before they could set foot on it, they had to set the landing pads of the LM there! How did they come up with geotechnical soil parameters for the design of the LM’s footpads? How did they determine a bearing capacity of lunar soil? Click through for this facinating article that I hope you will share with your colleagues.