A Reliability Study of a Retaining Wall Design with Seismic Loads

摘要

This paper presents a study on the reliability-based design of a cantilevered retaining wall under seismic earth loading condition. For the simplicity of discussions, the wall is assumed to embed in a granular material and the pseudo-static Mononobe-Okabe equations are used to determine dynamic earth pressures on the wall. The conventional limit equilibrium stability analyses are used to determine the embedment depths of the retaining wall under static and seismic loading conditions. The factors of safety for each loading condition are selected by a predetermined reliability acceptance criterion and earth load/resistance variances. The probability distributions of earth load and resistance are obtained from Monte Carlo simulations for the given statistical characteristics of soil properties, and they are used to determine the probability of failure or reliability of the wall design under static and seismic loading conditions. For the seismic loading scenario, the exceedance probability of seismic event is taken into account in determining the reliability of the wall design.