Simplified Procedure to Evaluate Earthquake-induced Residual Displacement of Geosynthetic Reinforced Soil Retaining Walls

Based on a series of shaking table model tests, it was found that the eŠects of 1) subsoil and backˆll deformation, 2) failure plane formation in backˆll, and 3) pullout resistance mobilized by the reinforcements on the seismic behaviors of the geosynthetic reinforced soil retaining walls (GRS walls) were signiˆcant. These eŠects cannot be taken into account in the conventional pseudo-static based limit equilibrium analyses or Newmark's rigid sliding block analogy, which are usually adopted as the seismic design procedure. Therefore, this study attempts to develop a simpliˆed procedure to evaluate earthquake-induced residual displacement of GRS walls by re‰ecting the knowledge on the seismic behaviors of GRS walls obtained from the shaking table model tests. In the proposed method, 1) the deformation characteristics of subsoil and backˆll are modeled based on the model test results and 2) the eŠect of failure plane formation is considered by using residual soil strength after the failure plane formation while the peak soil strength is used before the failure plane formation, and 3) the eŠect of the pullout resistance mobilized by the reinforcement is also introduced by evaluating the pullout resistance based on the results from the pullout tests of the reinforcements. By using the proposed method, simulations were performed on the shaking table model test results conducted under a wide variety of testing conditions and good agreements between the calculated and measured displacements were observed.