A New Approach for Estimating the Seismic Soil Pressure on Retaining Walls

Abstract

The model incorporates nonlinearity in the behavior of near wall soil, wall exibility and elastic free eld soil response. This model can be employed in nonlinear modeling of retaining walls and bridge abutments. The advantages of this model are simplicity and exibility in addition to acceptable precision. Using this nite element model, an analytical study is conducted on several soil-wall systems using nonlinear time-history analysis by applying real earthquake records. Based on the results of these analyses, new seismic soil pressure distributions are proposed for di erent soil and boundary conditions. These distributions are shown to be more accurate than the popular Mononobe-Okabe equations.