Suggestion of the earthquake equivalent horizontal acceleration coefficient by investigation of the dynamic behavior of polymeric strips reinforced soil retaining walls

Reinforced soil structures are finding increasing applications in seismic active zones. This makes it important to study the dynamic behavior of these structures. Therefore, the present article is an attempt to study the seismic behavior of reinforced soil retaining walls with polymeric strips. The effects of the most important parameters including the length of reinforcement, reinforcement arrangements (zigzag vs. parallel), maximum base input acceleration, and wave frequency on the wall displacement were investigated for sensitivity analyses. The main drawback of dynamic analysis is that numerical methods are time consuming. Therefore, determination of equivalent coefficients is a suitable and simple approach to converge results of pseudo-static and dynamic methods. In this case, a relatively accurate design is achieved by using pseudo static method that requires far less time. To this end, the earthquake equivalent horizontal acceleration coefficient is proposed by considering horizontal displacement of the wall as the basis for comparison.