Abstract: Reinforced soil retaining walls are widely used in the civil engineering because of their excellent seismic performance. The study on the seismic design method of reinforced soil retaining walls is particularly important. To analyze the effect of arrangement and tensile strength of reinforcement on the yield acceleration, the equation of coefficient of yield acceleration is derived based on limit analysis theory assuming a two-wedge form of the failure mode. Compared with the values calculated by the design codes, the results obtained by the proposed method are closer to the experimental test and the numerical simulation. Meanwhile, the proposed method can reflect the real failure mode of the models. Parametric analysis shows that: the yield acceleration increases gradually with the increase of the tensile strength of the reinforcement, especially when the reinforcement is longer; the yield acceleration decreases with the increase of vertical spacing of the reinforcement; the width of the panel facing barely affect the yield acceleration; compared with the width of the panel facing, the tensile strength and the vertical spacing of the reinforcement impact significantly on the failure shape.

Key words: reinforced soil retaining wall, limit analysis, two-wedge method, yield acceleration, reinforcement