Dynamic behaviour of drystone retaining walls: shaking table scaled-down tests

Abstract

In this paper, an experimental study aiming at understanding the seismic behaviour of dry stone retaining walls is presented. Harmonic shaking table tests have been carried out on scaled-down dry-joint retaining walls involving parallelepiped bricks. It is found that a thicker wall is more resistant and that a given retaining wall is less sensitive to higher frequencies. For those higher frequencies, the walls accept larger displacements before collapsing. The displacements start to occur from a given threshold, which depends on the wall geometry but not on the frequency of the base motion. The typical toppling failure is observed for slender wall and/or low frequency inputs. For less slender walls or higher frequency inputs, walls experience local sliding failures until the complete collapse of the system. The acceleration at failure reported during the dynamic tests has been compared to the corresponding pseudo-static resistance, enabling a conservative estimate of the seismic behaviour coefficient for pseudo-static analysis of this class of retaining walls. This novel experimental dataset is aimed to serve as a validating framework for future numerical or analytical tools in the field.