Kinematic Framework for Evaluating Seismic Earth Pressures on Retaining Walls
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Volume 141, Issue 7
Abstract
During earthquake ground shaking earth pressures on retaining structures can cyclically increase and decrease as a result of inertial forces applied to the walls and kinematic interactions between the stiff wall elements and surrounding soil. The application, based on limit equilibrium analysis, of a pseudostatic inertial force to a soil wedge behind the wall [the mechanism behind the widely-used Mononobe–Okabe (M–O) method] is a poor analogy for either inertial or kinematic wall–soil interaction. This paper demonstrates that the kinematic component of interaction varies strongly with the ratio of wavelength to wall height (), asymptotically approaching zero for large , and oscillating between the peak value and zero for . Base compliance, represented in the form of translational and rotational stiffness, reduces seismic earth pressure by permitting the walls to conform more closely to the free-field soil displacement profile. This framework can explain both relatively low seismic pressures relative to M–O predictions observed in recent experiments with , and relatively high seismic earth pressures relative to M–O from numerical analyses in the literature with .
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Acknowledgments
The authors thank Farhang Ostadan for sharing the ground motion data utilized in a 2005 paper, and the two anonymous reviewers whose comments helped improve the paper.
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Journal of Geotechnical and Geoenvironmental Engineering
Volume 141 • Issue 7 • July 2015
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© 2015 American Society of Civil Engineers.
History
Received: Jul 18, 2013
Accepted: Jan 30, 2015
Published online: Mar 16, 2015
Published in print: Jul 1, 2015
Discussion open until: Aug 16, 2015
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