Passive earth pressure of inclined retaining walls under seismic condition

Earthquake-resistant design of the rigid retaining walls is a very important measure to minimize the devastating effect of earthquake hazards.Based on the planar rupture surfaces hypothesis of Mononobe-Okabe theory,a method of horizontal slices is suggested to obtain the seismic passive earth pressure coefficient,the intensity of earth pressure,the resultant force of earth pressure and the application point of the resultant for various wall batter angles,soil friction angles and wall friction angles by considering the random occurrence seismic forces as a pseudo-static manner under the most unfavorable conditions.The effects of seismic acceleration coefficients,batter angles and the soil internal frictional angles on the passive earth pressure coefficient and distribution of passive earth pressure are investigated.The results show that the resultant seismic earth pressure is the same as that obtained by the Mononobe-Okabe approach and the distribution of seismic earth pressure is non-linear.The presence of seismic forces induces a considerable reduction in the passive earth resistance under the most unfavorable conditions.The reduction increases with the increase of the magnitude of the earthquake acceleration.