Geogrid reinforced soil slopes, gabion retaining walls, erosion control blankets and other geosynthetics are being used to construct the world’s largest human form sculpted into the landscape on a project known as Northcumberlandia. The woman sculpture is the centerpiece of a public park near Cramlington, in the north of England. The site is located adjacent to a surface coal mine, and the byproducts of the coal mining were used to construct the landform. A cover story in Geosynthetics Magazine a few months back featured the project, and the design aspects of the RSS and gabion walls that were use to form some of the woman’s more challenging features such as the chin, nose, and eyebrows. [Source: Read more about Northcumberlandia at GeosyntheticsMagazine.com. Image: Geosynthetics Ltd. via Geosynthetics Magazine]
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MSEW and ReSSA Updates
ADAMA Software has released update 9.2 for their Mechanically Stabilized Earth retaining wall design software, MSEW 3.0 as of December 12, 2008. They also released update 3.1 for ReSSA 3.0, a reinforced soil slope design program on January 15, 2009. The ReSSA update seems like a relatively minor one, but the MSEW update contains a number of updates related to AASHTO LRFD resistance factors and design methods. If you are involved in MSE wall design for highway structures using LRFD, be sure to click through for a few highlights from the update and the download link.
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.