RESEARCH ARTICLE


Estimation of Seismic Earth Pressures Against Rigid Retaining Structures with Rotation Mode



Fei Song*, 1, Jian-Min Zhang2
1 School of Highway Engineering, Chang’an University, 710064, Xi’an, China
2 Department of Hydroelectric Engineering, Tsinghua University, 100084, Beijing, China


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Creative Commons License
© 2011 Song and Zhang.

open-access license: This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Public License (CC-BY 4.0), a copy of which is available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode. This license permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

* Address correspondence to this author at the Institute of Geotechnical Engineering, School of Highway Engineering, Chang’an University, Xi’an 710064, China; Tel: +86-13572924667; Fax: +86-029-82334434; E-mail: songfei05@tsinghua.org.cn


Abstract

The evaluation of seismic earth pressures is of vital importance for the earthquake resistant design of various retaining walls and infrastructures. It is one of the key research subjects in soil mechanics and geotechnical engineering. In engineering practices, the magnitude and distribution of seismic earth pressures are greatly affected by the mode and amount of wall displacement. However, classic Mononobe-Okabe solution can only compute the seismic earth pressures at the limit state and doesn’t consider the effect of the mode and amount of wall movement on the seismic earth pressure. In this paper, the formation mechanism of earth pressures against rigid retaining wall with RTT and RBT mode is revealed based on the previous studies and a new method is proposed to calculate the seismic earth pressures in such conditions. Corresponding formula are derived and computer code is written to calculate the seismic earth pressure distribution based on the proposed methodology. Variation of seismic earth pressure coefficient for the rigid retaining wall with RTT and RBT mode is calculated and discussed. In addition, the effectiveness of the method is confirmed by the experimental results.

Keywords: Seismic earth pressures, rotation mode, wall displacement, ' formation mechanism, calculation method.