Seismic Response of Geocell Retaining Walls: Experimental Studies
Publication: Journal of Geotechnical and Geoenvironmental Engineering
Volume 135, Issue 4
Abstract
This paper summarizes the seismic response of five large-scale retaining walls having a geocell facing. The walls were high and the backfill and foundation soil were a fine sand compacted to 90% standard Proctor density (relative density of 55%). The first two walls were of the same geometry, with a tapered facing made of geocells each of height , one infilled with gravel and the other with sand. In Wall 3, a facing of depth was constructed while the backfill sand was reinforced with a polyester geogrid. Wall 4 was similar to Wall 3 except that the backfill was reinforced with several geocell layers. Wall 5 had thin geocell layers of height as reinforcements in order to improve the performance compared with Wall 4. The walls were subjected to the scaled horizontal and vertical motions as recorded during the 1995 Kobe earthquake, and maximum horizontal accelerations in the first and second excitations, respectively. In an attempt to induce failure, and therefore, to investigate the failure mechanism, Walls 3–5 were subjected to a third shaking in which the horizontal accelerations were scaled to . The walls were fully instrumented with accelerometers, laser displacement transducers, force transducers, and strain gauges. All five walls performed satisfactorily under the simulated earthquake motions. An improved wall performance was seen with the geocells acting as reinforcement layers. The study showed that geocells can be used successfully to form gravity walls as well as reinforcement layers even when subjected to a very high seismic load beyond that of the Kobe earthquake.
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Acknowledgments
This study was funded by the PRS-Mediterranean and implemented with the collaborative research agreement between Columbia University and the National Research Institute of Rural Engineering (NRIRE) in the use of shake table facilities. Mutsuo Takeuchi, Kenichi Matsushima, and Mitsuru Ariyoshi of NRIRE provided invaluable support for this study. Yoshikazu Okabe of the Tokyo Soil Research supervised the construction works.
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© 2009 ASCE.
History
Received: Oct 1, 2007
Accepted: Jun 17, 2008
Published online: Apr 1, 2009
Published in print: Apr 2009
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