Earthquakes and Structures

Volume 14, Number 2, 2018, pages 179-186

DOI: 10.12989/eas.2018.14.2.179

The numerical study of seismic behavior of gravity retaining wall built near rock face

Hossein Taravati and Alireza Ardakani

Abstract

We present the accurate investigation the seismic behavior of the gravity retaining wall built near rock face based on numerical method. The retaining wall is a useful structure in geotechnical engineering, where the earthquake is a common phenomenon; therefore, the evaluation of the behavior of the retaining wall during an earthquake is essential. However, in all previous studies, the backfill behind the wall was usually approximated by a homogeneous region, while in contrast, in practice, in many cases retaining walls are used to support the soil pressure in, inhomogeneous, mountainous area. This suggests an accurate investigation of the problem, i.e., numerical analysis. The numerical results will be compared with some of recently proposed analytical methods to show the accuracy of the proposed method. We show that increasing the volume of the rock face yields decreasing the permanent horizontal displacement of the gravity retaining wall built near rock face. Besides, we see that the permanent horizontal displacement of the gravity retaining wall with homogenous backfill is more than permanent horizontal displacement of the gravity retaining wall case of the built near rock face in different frequency contents.

Key Words

gravity retaining wall; near rock face; seismic behavior; earthquake; numerical method

Address

Hossein Taravati and Alireza Ardakani: Department of Civil Engineering, Imam Khomeini International University, Qazvin, Iran