RESEARCH ARTICLE
Numerical Analysis of Earthquake Load Mitigation on Rigid Retaining Walls Using EPS Geofoam
Deling Wang*, 1, Richard J. Bathurst2
Article Information
Identifiers and Pagination:
Year: 2012Volume: 6
First Page: 21
Last Page: 25
Publisher ID: TOCIEJ-6-21
DOI: 10.2174/1874149501206010021
Article History:
Received Date: 23/11/2011Revision Received Date: 30/11/2011
Acceptance Date: 20/12/2011
Electronic publication date: 09/3/2012
Collection year: 2012
open-access license: This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Public License (CC-BY 4.0), a copy of which is available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode. This license permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Abstract
The mitigation of seismic-induced dynamic earth forces by placing a vertical layer of expanded polystyrene (EPS) geofoam buffer between a rigid retaining wall and the backfill soil is a recent geotechnical innovation. In this paper, the influence of an EPS geofoam buffer on the reduction of dynamic wall forces is numerically studied by simulating the results of three reduced-scale models of rigid walls mounted on a large shaking table. Numerical simulations were carried out using the finite element program ABAQUS. The paper shows that the numerical results capture the trend in earth forces with increasing base acceleration for all three models. The quantitative dynamic load-time response from the numerical simulations was also judged to be in good agreement with measured physical test values. The numerical trend of EPS geofoam also is the same as that of measured test data. With the increasing time, the compression of EPS geofoam increases. And softer EPS geofoam produces more compression which takes more vibration energy by its deformation. The numerical results confirm the results of physical tests that demonstrate that EPS geofoam seismic buffers hold great promise to reduce earthquake-induced dynamic loads against rigid retaining wall structures.
