Abstract
The dynamic response magnitudes of retaining walls under seismic loadings, such as earthquakes, are influenced by their natural frequencies. Resonances can occur when the natural frequency of a wall is close to the loading frequency, which could result in serious damage or collapse. Although field percussion tests are usually used to study the health state of retaining walls, they are complicated and time consuming. A natural frequency equation for retaining walls with tapered wall facings is established in this paper using the transfer matrix method (TMM). The proposed method is validated against the results of numerical simulations and field tests. Results show that fundamental frequencies decrease gradually with wall height; soil elastic modulus exerts a great influence on the fundamental frequency for walls with smaller facing stiffness; fundamental frequencies are smaller for a hinged toe than a fixed toe condition, and this difference is smaller in taller walls.
Highlights
Retaining walls are widely used in civil engineering due to their advantages, such as simple structural forms and convenient constructions
Nakamura [3] carried out centrifuge model tests to evaluate the rationality of the M-O theory and found that it could not explain the dynamic responses accurately under earthquake loadings
Using a modified pseudodynamic method, Pain et al [7] proposed an equation of critical seismic acceleration for gravity retaining walls
Summary
Retaining walls are widely used in civil engineering (e.g., roads and railways) due to their advantages, such as simple structural forms and convenient constructions. To evaluate the dynamic performances of structures directly, percussion tests have been carried out by many researchers [9, 10] In this method, walls are subjected to a weak excitation induced by an iron ball to avoid generating large displacement, and response accelerations are collected to obtain the natural frequency. Field percussion tests and existing analytical methods have been carried out and proposed to study the natural frequencies, they are either costly, time consuming, or limited in structures with constant cross section shapes. To predict the natural frequencies of retaining walls with tapered facings which are generally used in civil engineering, a new method is proposed in this paper. Examples are used to evaluate the accuracy of the proposed method, and a parametric analysis is carried out to analyze the influences of wall facing, wall height, and soil on its natural frequencies
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