Investigation on Differential Settlements of a Tall Geosynthetic Reinforced Soil Wall During Seismic Loads

Significance of the perpendicular-to-facing differential settlements of GRS walls is relativelyneglected in literature in comparison with along-facing settlements. Hence, a series of seismic finiteelement analyses was conducted to assess perpendicular-to-facing differential settlements of a 20 mgeosynthetic reinforced soil (GRS) wall during 36 seismic records. Static and dynamic verifications ofnumerical modeling were performed using results of a 3.6 m large-scale physical GRS wall model anda 1 m shaking table test at the Royal Military Collage (RMC) of Canada, respectively. Furthermore,HS-small constitutive model was used for reinforced soil modeling. The results indicated that therelative deformations were critical between facing and reinforced zone, and between reinforced andretained zones, as much as absolute settlements. Furthermore, the amount of differential settlementswas dependent on the intensity of seismic records. Correlations between relative settlements andintensity of earthquakes were also proposed based on the results of this paper

Investigation on Differential Settlements of a Tall Geosynthetic Reinforced Soil Wall During Seismic Loads Keywords:

Geosynthetic Reinforced Soil (GRS) Wall , Differential Settlements , Seismic FiniteElement Analyses , Tall GRS Walls , HS-Small Constitutive Model