Effect of reinforcement design on seismic response of reinforced soil retaining walls

摘要

Seismic response of reinforced soil retaining walls is studied using reduced-scale shaking table tests and numerical simulation. The focus of the paper is to investigate the influence of reinforcement design parameters (i.e. stiffness, length and vertical spacing) on the simulated earthquake response of retaining wall systems. A series of heavily instrumented 1/6-scale model walls was constructed and tested to failure using stepped-amplitude sinusoidal base acceleration. Experimental results showed that the magnitude of accumulated facing lateral displacement under base excitation decreased with reinforcement length and number of reinforcement layers but deformations were largely unaffected by the stiffness of the two reinforcement materials used. A numerical model using the dynamic finite-difference program FLAC was developed and shown to give good agreement with the results of the shaking table tests.