Earlier this summer, Rocscience kicked off its RSWall webinar series with a deep dive into advanced gabion wall design. The session featured Dr. Sina Javankhoshdel from Rocscience and Gianluca Brocca from Maccaferri, a company with over 130 years of experience in gabion systems. The focus? How RSWall, Rocscience’s newly released retaining wall design software, handles the complexities of gabion wall modeling and analysis.
Gabion walls are celebrated for their flexibility, permeability, and sustainability. Maccaferri’s historical perspective was especially compelling, tracing the evolution of gabions from their origins in flood control near Bologna, Italy, to today’s polymer-coated, prefilled units designed for rapid installation and long service life, even in aggressive environments.
The webinar also showcased RSWall’s capabilities, including support for multiple wall types (MSE, gravity, cantilever, gabion, and more), integration with other Rocscience tools like Slide2 and Slide3, and detailed hand-calculation reports that make the software anything but a black box. Dr. Javankhoshdel walked through a multi-segment gabion wall case study, demonstrating how RSWall handles geometry, loading, soil profiles, and stability analysis with impressive flexibility.
For those of us in geotechnical engineering, especially those working with retaining structures in challenging conditions, RSWall’s approach to gabion wall design, backed by Maccaferri’s materials expertise, offers a powerful combination of theory, practice, and transparency. You can watch the webinar below or directly on YouTube.
