Assessment of seismic behavior of back-to-back mechanically stabilized earth walls using 1g shaking table tests

Abstract

In current study, the effect of overlap length of reinforcements (LR) and arrangement of connecting two opposing walls to each other on the seismic behavior of back-to-back MSE walls (BBMSEWs) was investigated using reduced-scale 1-g shaking table tests. Results showed that fundamental frequency (ff) of BBMSEWs strongly depends on the arrangement of reinforcements and the ff value decreases with decreasing LR and separating two opposing walls from each other. It was also concluded that increasing the overlap length of reinforcements and separating the bottom half of two walls from each other can be two good solutions for reducing the possible acceleration amplification in BBMSEWs. The combination of a slant and a reverse curve with certain intersection point was observed as the failure surface in all the models. The geometry of failure surface was found to be unaffected by LR changes and only dependes on the arrangement of connecting two opposing walls to each other. On the other hand, the increase in ay values due to increasing LR and connecting two opposing walls to each other showed that the use of direct connection of two walls and applying a suitable LR can be considered as two suitable solutions to improve the seismic stability of BBMSEWs. It was also found that although the use of overlapping reinforcement instead of the direct connection of two walls to each other leads to increasing the lateral displacements, but it can be a good solution for reducing mobilized reinforcement forces in BBMSEWs.