Evaluation of Seismic Earth Pressures at the Passive Side

Abstract eng:
Estimation of seismic earth pressures constitutes an important subject of research in civil engineering. Previous studies showed strong dependence of earth pressure coefficient on lateral strain constraint of the backfill, i.e., the wall displacement has a significant effect on seismic earth pressures acting against retaining structures. Besides, experimental investigations and theoretical analysis indicate that when the backfill is at the passive side, the planar sliding surface assumption will overestimate earth resistance for higher wall friction angles, which will make structures such as sheet pile walls and their anchor blocks depending on earth pressures at the passive side for support underdesgned. In this paper, based on pseudo-static analysis and the concept of “intermediate soil wedge” with curved surface, a new methodology is developed to evaluate seismic earth pressures at the passive side under any boundary strain constraint for a rigid retaining structure with translational movement. It has the advantage over the Mononobe-Okabe method since it can take into account the effect of wall displacement on lateral earth pressures and the curved sliding surface is employed in the analysis. The approach can determine the seismic earth pressure coefficient of normally consolidated cohesionless soil under any lateral deformation between the isotropic compression and the passive states. Corresponding computer program is written to calculate the seismic earth pressure of a typical retaining wall system. The results are compared with those obtained based on the assumption of a planar sliding surface.

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