Effect of Soil Amplification on Seismic Earth Pressure Using Pseudo-Dynamic Approach

Abstract

The study of seismic earth pressure is essential for the design of a retaining wall in the earthquake-prone regions. Pseudo-static and pseudo-dynamic approaches are widely used for cohesionless soil backfill without considering the effect of soil amplification. Soil amplification is a very important factor for the calculation of seismic active earth pressure and should not be ignored in the design in the earthquake-prone regions. In this paper, a generalized formulation has been presented to compute the seismic active earth pressure distribution on the inclined retaining wall back-face. The retaining wall supports the inclined cohesionless soil backfill. A parametric study has been conducted to study the effect of various parameters like soil friction angle, the inclination of wall back-face, the inclination of soil backfill, wall friction angle, soil amplification, horizontal and vertical seismic coefficients. The results of the present study have been compared with the available results of an earlier study. The study highlighted the effect of model parameters on seismic earth pressure.