Search

This work presents a probabilistic analysis of three-dimensional (3D) seismic active earth pressures acting on rigid retaining walls that are designed to support cohesive-frictional soil masses. The analysis is implemented using sparse polynomial chaos expansions (SPCE) to represent the physical model responses. The deterministic evaluation of 3D seismic active earth pressures is conducted with the application of the kinematic approach of limit analysis combined with a pseudo-static method. All of the input parameters are deemed as random variables. After the SPCE metamodels are determined, the method of Monte Carle simulations is applied to perform the probabilistic analysis of 3D seismic active earth pressures. The effects of uncertainty levels and correlation relationships of input parameters are investigated. Several illustrative examples of the reliability-based design of retaining walls are shown. Results indicate that uncertainties in input parameters possess a notable effect on 3D seismic active earth pressures, suggesting the need to investigate the problem from a stochastic perspective. In most cases, the soil cohesion, internal friction angle, and seismic coefficient are found to be three of the parameters that affect the final response the most significantly. It is also indicated that considering 3D effects and soil cohesion has a favorable effect on increasing the stability of retained slopes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The existing analytical models for predicting earth pressures based on the kinematical approach of limit analysis are limited to soil masses with homogeneous internal frictional angles. To overcome this drawback, this work proposes a discretised failure mechanism to calculate the location of earth forces and evaluate the active and passive earth pressures against inclined retaining walls with horizontal backfills for the first time. Comparisons with other existing analytical solutions, numerical simulations and experimental tests are made to verify the proposed method for the cases of single-layer and multi-layer backfills. Practical design tables are presented for a two-layer case. Application of the proposed model to three-layer backfills with a middle weak layer is presented. The influence of the position of the weak layer on the critical earth pressures and failure mechanisms is discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]