Seismic Earth Pressures on Cantilever Retaining Structures
Publication: Journal of Geotechnical and Geoenvironmental Engineering
Volume 136, Issue 10
Abstract
An experimental and analytical program was designed and conducted to evaluate the magnitude and distribution of seismically induced lateral earth pressures on cantilever retaining structures with dry medium dense sand backfill. Results from two sets of dynamic centrifuge experiments and two-dimensional nonlinear finite-element analyses show that maximum dynamic earth pressures monotonically increase with depth and can be reasonably approximated by a triangular distribution. Moreover, dynamic earth pressures and inertia forces do not act simultaneously on the cantilever retaining walls. As a result, designing cantilever retaining walls for maximum dynamic earth pressure increment and maximum wall inertia, as is the current practice, is overly conservative and does not reflect the true seismic response of the wall-backfill system. The relationship between the seismic earth pressure increment coefficient at the time of maximum overall wall moment and peak ground acceleration obtained from our experiments suggests that seismic earth pressures on cantilever retaining walls can be neglected at accelerations below 0.4 g. This finding is consistent with the observed good seismic performance of conventionally designed cantilever retaining structures.
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Acknowledgments
The writers gratefully acknowledge the support and valuable input provided by Professor Bruce Kutter, Dr. Dan Wilson, and all the staff at the Center for Geotechnical Modeling at the University of California, Davis. This research was supported by a grant from the San Francisco BART and the Santa Clara VTA to the Pacific Earthquake Engineering Research Center at UC Berkeley. The writers also received valuable input from Ed Matsuda, Dr. Jose Vallenas at BART, and James Chai at VTA. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this paper are those of the writers and do not necessarily reflect those of the funding agencies.
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Information & Authors
Information
Published In
Journal of Geotechnical and Geoenvironmental Engineering
Volume 136 • Issue 10 • October 2010
Pages: 1324 - 1333
Copyright
© 2010 ASCE.
History
Received: Aug 31, 2009
Accepted: Feb 27, 2010
Published online: Mar 6, 2010
Published in print: Oct 2010
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