PDEM-Based Seismic Performance Assessment of Retaining Walls Considering Spatial Variability of Soil Properties

ABSTRACT

Spatial variability is a natural attribute of soil properties and strongly affects seismic performance of earth structures. A novel stochastic dynamics method, probability density evolution method (PDEM), is proposed for seismic performance evaluation of retaining walls considering spatial variability of soil properties. Abundant probabilistic results of retaining wall, such as the mean, standard variance, evolution of probability density functions and dynamic reliability, are acquired in present study. It is found that neglecting the spatial variability of soil properties by treating soil properties as a uniform field in each realization may overrate the safety of the retaining wall.

KEYWORDS:

• Probabilistic method
• retaining walls
• spatial variability
• dynamic reliability
• performance levels

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China [Grants Nos. 41625011 and 51778467] and the National Key R&D Program of China [Grant No. 2017YFC1501304]. The earthquake data set was provided by the China Strong Motion Network Center.