Seismic Stability Analysis of Sliding Retaining Walls Supporting Unsaturated Backfill with Cracks under Steady Flow Conditions

Abstract

Given the fact that retaining structures in seismically active areas are key barriers for geotechnical engineering disaster prevention and mitigation, accurately assessing their seismic stability throughout their life cycle is an extremely important and urgent task. However, the traditional stability analysis method ignores the effect of suction stress, which results in a large discrepancy between the calculated results and the engineering practice. In view of this, this study derives the work–energy balance equation that is applicable to unsaturated soils within the framework of the generalized effective stress principle, and on this basis, proposes a method for calculating the coefficient of antislip stability of unsaturated retaining walls under seismic excitations by using the energy method and incorporating the pre-existing or formation cracks into the calculation procedure. The reasonableness of the proposed method of this study was verified by comparing the calculation results with those of OptumG2 (academic version) and existing theoretical methods. Finally, a detailed parametric study was carried out to investigate the effect of main parameters on antislip stability under unsaturated steady seepage conditions.