Influence of Reinforcement Parameters on the Seismic Response of Reinforced Earth Dams
Reza Boushehri, Seddigheh Hasanpour Estahbanati, Seyed Majdeddin Mir Mohammad Hosseini, Abbas Soroush
Abstract
Seismic safety of large embankment dams in earthquake prone regions is critical if a large population lives on the downstream of the dam or the reservoir provides a great amount of water. The main purpose of this paper is to investigate the effects of main reinforcement design parameters (e.g. stiffness, vertical spacing, etc.) on seismic response of geogrid-reinforced embankment dams. Finite element (FE) constitutive model is developed to capture nonlinear response of soil and reinforcement elements at large strains. A series of analyses are performed and results, in terms of normalized horizontal and vertical displacements alongside the embankment dam height, and mobilized reinforcement stresses along the geogrids are plotted in dimensionless figures. The results show significant decrease in both horizontal and vertical displacements, and increase in geogrids tensile stresses due to the increase in reinforcement stiffness. Furthermore, it will be demonstrated that decrease in the geogrids vertical spacing results in lower values of tensile stresses along the geogrids and improves the seismic performance of reinforced earth dams, considerably.