Nonlinear dynamic analysis of soil nail walls considering different modeling approaches

Abstract

Soil nailing is one of the most common and important techniques to exchange conventional retaining systems for deep excavation. This approach contains a significant saving in cost and time of construction compared to conventional retaining systems. In this paper, an attempt has been made to evaluate the dynamical response of a deep vertical excavation on ground of 8 m height using soil nail wall. It has been tried to investigate the effects of different modeling approaches on the dynamic response of soil-nailed walls by considering the three behavioral methods; Mohr Coulomb (MC), hardening soil (HS) and hardening soil model with Small-Strain stiffness ensued from small strains (HSS). Nonlinear time history analysis has been implemented to compare the displacements under the sinus excitation with 0.5, 1, and 1.5 Hz with PGA= 0.3 g. Different points along the height of the wall are selected and considered. At the last part of this paper, incremental dynamic analysis (IDA) was implemented to the soil nail wall to consider the effect of the different earthquake records on the response of the wall. The IDA curve is also presented for the considered soil nail wall.