Seismic rotational displacement of retaining walls: a pseudo-dynamic approach

Abstract Design of earth retaining wall is an important problem in geotechnical engineering. A retaining wall may fail in sliding or rotation. In the present study, rotational mode of failure is considered. A new approach to compute the rotational displacement of gravity retaining wall under seismic condition is proposed. Seismic forces are computed using pseudo-dynamic method. Dry backfill soil is considered. The present solution is for horizontal ground surface. In the computation of rotational displacement, the location of rotating wall and shift in the point of application of all the associated forces after each time step is included which was ignored in earlier studies. From the present analysis, it is found that the rotational displacement depends on the characteristics of the input motion. A non-dimensional term is used to quantify the effect of input motion on the rotational displacement. Shear strength properties of the backfill soil and geometry of the wall plays very crucial role in computation of rotational displacement.