Abstract: Reinforced soil retaining walls showed excellent seismic performance in a large number of earthquakes. In the design of reinforced earth retaining wall under seismic loading, the dynamic load can be regarded as equivalent to the static load according to the quasi-static method. A shaking table test of reinforced soil retaining wall with full-height rigid (FHR) facing was carried out to compare the difference between the response obtained by pseudo-static method and the actual dynamic response. The facing displacement, response acceleration, dynamic earth pressure, and the reinforcement load were measured and analyzed. The following conclusions have been drawn: the distribution of the response acceleration in the reinforced soil retaining wall is non-uniform, and the accelerations in the facing and the reinforced zone are larger than those in the retained zone; the response accelerations measured are larger than those calculated from the current design guidelines; although the location of the dynamic earth pressure at the back of the facing is higher than the design value, the resultant force is only 15%-20% of that calculated by the Mononobe-Okabe method; as a result of the effects of acceleration amplification along the facing and the higher location of the dynamic earth pressure, the predominant deformation mode of the FHR facing is rotation; the distribution of the reinforcement tensile force along the wall facing is nonlinear, and the measured force is larger than that calculated from the code in China.

Key words: reinforced soil retaining wall, earthquake, pseudo-static method, shaking table test, acceleration