Sliding Displacement of Flexible Earth Slopes Subject to Near-Fault Ground Motions
Publication: Journal of Geotechnical and Geoenvironmental Engineering
Volume 141, Issue 3
Abstract
A fully coupled simplified method that incorporates soil nonlinearity is used to conduct sliding-block analysis of slopes subjected to near-fault pulse-like and nonpulse-like ground motions. The effects of the ground motion pulse on the computed sliding displacements are investigated, and the efficiency of various ground motion intensity measures for predicting the sliding displacement of slopes is evaluated. It is shown that the slope is expected to have larger displacements over shorter time intervals when near-fault ground motions have pulse-like characteristics. Results also indicate that for cases in which the natural period of a slope is close to the period of the pulse of a recorded ground motion, an equivalent wavelet pulse appropriately represents the displacement response of slopes. Predictive models are developed for the sliding displacement of near-fault ground motions using spectral acceleration and peak ground velocity as predictive variables. In addition, it is shown that for certain cases displacements can be predicted using simplified pulse parameters and simplified wavelet pulses. The developed models can be incorporated into probabilistic seismic demand analysis for slopes located near active faults.
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Acknowledgments
The authors thank the directivity working group of the PEER’s NGA-West2 project for having identified and published the ground motion database that was directly relevant to this paper. The authors also thank the Chinese Scholarship Council for providing the funding that enabled the first author to visit Virginia Tech to do the work presented in this paper.
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Published In
Journal of Geotechnical and Geoenvironmental Engineering
Volume 141 • Issue 3 • March 2015
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© 2014 American Society of Civil Engineers.
History
Received: Mar 5, 2014
Accepted: Sep 30, 2014
Published online: Nov 3, 2014
Published in print: Mar 1, 2015
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