A New Slice Method for Seismic Stability Analysis of Reinforced Retaining Wall

According to retaining walls reinforced by extensible reinforcements such as geogrids and geotextiles, a new slice analysis methodology was developed to analyze its internal stability under horizontal and vertical seismic loads. The slide failure wedge of the reinforced retaning wall was divided into a number of soil slices parrallel to the reinforcements. Based on the single line shape assumption for the critical slip surface of the wall, the equilibrium equations for horizontal forces, vertical forces and moments of each soil slice were established. And then, the recurrence formulas for horizontal and vertical inter-slice forces, reinforcement tensile forces were derived consequently, in which the relationship between the inter-slice forces and the safety factor

FS

of the wall was included. The safety factor

FS

and the vertical bearing capacity qmax at the wall top were obtained by solving those recurrence formulas. This proposed slice method was applied to analyze the seismic stability of one reinforced retaining wall whose height was 10m, and the results were compared with those of strength reduction method. The results show that: this method is simple, practical and good precision in calculation, so it can be used in actual seismic stability design of reinforced walls; the simplifed critcal slip surface is more feasible and convenient for engineering application than the log-spiral failure surface.