A pair of about 11 m-high soil retaining walls of an U-shaped underground reinforced concrete (RC) structure in Tokyo exhibited a large residual inward (i.e., toward the active side) displacement with potential structural damage, which became 18 cm between the tops of the two walls about three years after its completion. Noticeable settlements of the backfill were observed behind the walls. A series of small-scale model tests was performed in the laboratory to understand this field behaviour. The results from in-situ investigation and model tests showed that this wall behaviour can be attributed to a gradual increase in the residual lateral earth pressure, resulting from cyclic lateral displacements of the walls caused by a small number of relatively large seasonal thermal cyclic displacement of the RC wall facing and bottom slab of the structure, not by a great number of relatively small daily displacement. Three factors for the mechanism of this wall behaviour (i.e., ratcheting, cyclic hardening and cyclic loading-induced residual deformation of the backfill) were identified and analyzed based the model test results. The settlement in the backfill observed in the model tests is consistent with the field behaviour.
展开▼
