Reply to the discussion by Greco on “Seismic active earth pressure behind a nonvertical retaining wall using pseudo-dynamic analysis”Appears in Canadian Geotechnical Journal, 45(12): 1795–1797.

Abstract

I am pleased to respond to the valuable comments provided by the discusser. I completely agree that the critical condition under an active case caused by the vertical earthquake force (Qv) generally occurs when the force acts in a vertically downward direction for lower values of the horizontal earthquake acceleration coefficient ah, whereas the reverse direction of Qv generally satisfies the critical condition for higher values of ah. Therefore, it is very true that the magnitude of Kae will be in line with the values provided by the discusser in Table 1 if the critical condition is considered. However, the objective of my paper was not to explore the critical condition but rather to study the application of the pseudo-dynamic approach to determine the seismic active thrust on a nonvertical cantilever retaining wall. The Mononobe–Okabe method (Kramer 1996) and the method of Choudhury and Nimbalkar (2006) considered Qv acting in a vertically upward direction to report the magnitude of Kae. Keeping this in view, the direction of Qv was considered the same in the analysis in my paper just to compare the existing values in the literature, and therefore a systematic search of the direction of Qv under the critical condition was beyond the scope of my study. However, it can be seen from Fig. 1 in the discussion that for lower values of ah the difference in magnitude of Kae values obtained with different directions of Qv is not significant. References