Seismic stability of reinforced soil walls under bearing capacity failure by pseudo-dynamic method

Abstract

In order to evaluate the seismic stability of reinforced soil walls against bearing capacity failure, the seismic safety factor of reinforced soil walls was determined by using pseudo-dynamic method, and calculated by considering different parameters, such as horizontal and vertical seismic acceleration coefficients, ratio of reinforcement length to wall height, back fill friction angle, foundation soil friction angle, soil-reinforcement interface friction angle and surcharge. The parametric study shows that the seismic safety factor increases by 24-fold when the foundation soil friction angle varies from 25° to 45°, and increases by 2-fold when the soil-reinforcement interface friction angle varies from 0 to 30°. That is to say, the bigger values the foundation soil and/or soil-reinforcement interface friction angles have, the safer the reinforced soil walls become in the seismic design. The results were also compared with those obtained from pseudo-static method. It is found that there is a higher value of the safety factor by the present work.