SEISMIC ANALYSES OF SLOPE STABILITY AND LIMITING EARTH PRESSURES ACTING ON RETAINING STRUCTURES

In this thesis, a discretization-based kinematic analysis was proposed to investigate the seismic stability of a soil slope and assess seismic limiting earth pressures acting on retaining structures. Such an analysis enables one to account for varying soil properties and complicated earthquake inputs, since it combines the advantages of discretization technique and upper bound theorem. The earthquake signal is characterized by horizontal and vertical accelerations, in terms of pseudo-static and pseudo-dynamic approaches. Pseudo-dynamic solutions of seismic slope stability and active/passive earth pressures are in a sense more meaningful than the pseudo-static. Centrifuge modelling (with PIV technique) was performed on submerged soil slopes to show the robustness of the proposed approach. Considering that there are some scenarios where earthquake-induced slope failure occurs, some countermeasures including installation of stabilizing piles and/or geosynthetics are commonly used, and the seismic stability of reinforced slopes with piles or geosynthetics was analysed, considering the pseudo-static/-dynamic approaches.

Author dc:creator

• QIN CHANGBING

• earthquake, discretization-based kinematic analysis, centrifuge modelling, soil slope stability, limiting earth pressures, piles/geosynthetics