RTRI REPORT January 2000

New Seismic Earth Pressure Against High Seismic Loads

Masaru TATEYAMA, Kenichi KOJIMA,
Ryo SAWADA, Katsumi HORII


  By the 1995 Hyogoken-Nambu Earthquake, many important engineering structures were seriously damaged including soil retaining structures. After the earthquake, a two-stage seismic design procedure was proposed based on two different levels of the combination of seismic load and expected structural performance for several types of civil engineering structures and retaining walls (JSCE, 1996). To correspond to this proposal, a new seismic earth pressure against high seismic loads was proposed. This is a modified and pseudo-static limit-equilibrium approach to evaluate the active earth pressure. The proposed method is the same at the Mononobe-Okabe method except that it considers the effects of strain localization in the backfill soil and associated post-peak reduction in the shear resistance from the peak to residual values along a previously formed failure plane. This paper describes an outline of the new seismic earth pressure.



Copyright (c) 2000 Railway Technical Research Institute