Seismic earth pressures acting on reinforced-soil and conventional type retaining walls

Comparisons are made on the resultant force of normal earth pressures that were measured in a series of model tests on six different types of soil retaining walls with a height of 530 or 500 mm, backfilled with dense dry sand. They consist of three reinforced-soil retaining walls with a full-height rigid facing and three conventional (cantilever, gravity and leaning) type retaining walls. The resultant forces of normal earth pressures measured in tilting tests were, in a broad sense, comparable with theoretical ones based on the Mononobe-Okabe or its equivalent method. On the other hand, the resultant forces measured in sinusoidal and irregular shaking tests were smaller than those measured in the tilting tests. However, by making corrections for the horizontal and vertical response accelerations of soil wedge in the backfill, the measured values became much close to the theoretical ones, in particular, in the region at high seismic loads.