Seismic Soil Pressures on Rigid Walls Subjected to Pulse-Like Earthquake Ground Motions

Abstract

Pulse-like earthquakes are believed to impose larger structural demands on structures due to the sudden release of seismic energy. This can cause concern in areas that are near faults due to the possibility of structures not being designed to withstand higher seismic demands and could be significant for embedded retaining walls in nuclear power plants. A finite element model of a soil-embedded wall is developed to examine the non-linear response of this system to pulse-like earthquake ground motions. For the finite element analysis, the open-source program OpenSees version 3.3 is used for the simulation of an embedded rigid retaining wall. The analyses are performed using records that match narrow-band modified target spectra for different moment magnitude scenarios ranging from 5.03 to 7.70. The results from pressure methods will be compared with the full non-linear finite element model results. Generally, it is observed that this type of earthquake imposes larger demands on an embedded rigid retaining wall, but the magnitude of the demand is still comparable to normal ground motions.