New Approach to Determine Seismic Passive Resistance on Retaining Walls Considering Seismic Waves

Abstract

Calculation of seismic earth pressure is important for design of retaining walls in earthquake-prone areas. Existing analytical methods for computation of seismic passive earth pressure do not consider the effect of Rayleigh waves, although they constitute about 67% of the total seismic energy. In this paper, a new dynamic approach is proposed by considering primary, shear, and Rayleigh waves for estimation of seismic passive earth pressure by satisfying all the boundary conditions including a zero-stress condition at the ground surface. The limit equilibrium method is used to calculate seismic passive earth pressure for a rigid retaining wall supporting cohesionless backfill with critical combinations of seismic accelerations. The seismic influence zone obtained in this study is about 23 and 14% larger compared with available pseudostatic and pseudodynamic methods, respectively, which indicates the effect of Rayleigh waves. Also, there is a decrease of 22 and 3% in seismic passive earth pressure coefficient when the present results are typically compared with pseudostatic and pseudodynamic methods, respectively. The present results are more critical for calculation of seismic passive earth pressure by considering all major seismic waves in the proposed new dynamic approach.