Recent earthquakes events in Japan, United States, Turkey, Iran, Italy have increasethe interest to the analysis of soil structures subjected to seismic loads. The commonprocedure used to design slopes is based on limit equilibrium methods. The methodis used to analyse the stability of slopes with and without reinforcements. Theperformance of reinforced soil slopes were investigated in this paper by a number ofshaking table tests carried out in the University of Catania shaking table facilities.The required length of reinforcements was calculated using the relationship of Jewellas modified and proposed by Cascone, Maugeri, Motta (1995) for the seismic design.All reinforced slopes models were built with the inclination respect the horizontal of70° and height of 0.35m. The soil used in the tests is a typical dry silica sand of theEast Coast of Sicily. The reinforcement, chosen to obtain a good scale factors withthe model, is a bi-directional polypropylene geogrid. Each tests is subjected to auniform surcharge obtained by small block elements with the purpose to apply a loadvalue of 1 kPa. The models were subjected to a sinusoidal progressively increasingacceleration and to the E-W component of Catania earthquake of 1990. Moreover theshaking table tests were performed to investigate the effects of the reinforcementsvertical spacing. Model deformations were found to be depending on thereinforcements spacing and on the level acceleration of the input motion. Two-wedgefailure mechanism is a dominant one as showed by the failure surfaces observed.
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