Altogether six MSE earth walls were subjected many base excitations on the National Geotechnical Centrifuge at the University of California, Davis. In general walls behaved as expected, i.e., walls with longer reinforcement deformed less whereas walls with shorter reinforcement deformed more. There was no catastrophic failure observed in any six walls. A relatively simple rigid plastic model for predicting the seismic permanent displacement of MSE walls supporting dry cohesionless soils is presented. Amplification or deamplification was observed in the backfill, depending on the level of base excitation. The proposed analytical model considered the variation of the acceleration in the backfill. Computed and measured wall displacements were compared for two MSE walls. The study reveals that the proposed analytical model captures many aspects of the characteristic behavior of MSE walls under seismic loading. The agreement between the predicted and measured wall displacement is very good.
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