Dynamic behaviour of reinforced earth walls

Abstract

This work analyses the behaviour of some typologies of reinforced earth retaining structures during a seismic event comparing calculation results with those obtained for a traditional concrete wall Four different typologies of walls are considered: - concrete cantilever wall; - steel strips reinforced earth wall with concrete face panel, - geosynthetic sheets reinforced earth wall with concrete face panel; - metallic grids earth reinforced wall with metallic gabbions filled with stones as face panel. Analytical results are relevant to some typical ground stratifications and to different values of the wall height for a II category seismic Italian region. It's necessary to specify that for the seismic design of reinforced earth structures the usual procedures founded on pseudostatic methods can result very conservative and so it is preferable to use alternative solutions. In general, it is known that soil dynamic analysis is more significative as it is founded on the total induced seismic displacement but other methods, like numerical methods may be important for the reinforced earth walls to calculate strains and stresses in the structural components. In this work, pseudostatic method and finite elements method are considered in order to compare their hypotheses and applicability ranges.