Abstract: In order to reasonably analyze seismic stability of filling slopes retained by gravity walls anchored horizontally with flexible reinforcements, the quasi-static method combined with the horizontally and obliquely slicing limit equilibrium methods are adopted to derive the safety factor of the wall-slope overall stability based on the hypothesis of interslice forces proposed by the Fellenius and the simplified Bishop methods. Considering the tensile rupture and the potential pulling out failure mechanism of the reinforcements, the proposed method is verified through numerical simulations under various horizontal seismic effect coefficients. Then the influences of the internal friction angle, the cohesion of the backfill and foundation soil, the vertical spacing, the ultimate tensile force, and the length of the reinforcements on the seismic wall-slope overall stability are studied, respectively. The results show that the safety factor calculated by the proposed method with the simplified Bishop’s hypothesis is fairly identical with the numerical results, which is about 6% higher than that calculated by the proposed method with the Fellenius hypothesis. Besides, the safety factor increases approximately linearly with the increase of shear strength of the filling and foundation soil, increases nonlinearly with the increase of the ultimate tensile force and the length of the top reinforcement, but decreases nonlinearly with the increase of the vertical spacing of the reinforcements. Additionally, potential slip surfaces of the retained slope by the proposed methods are close to the numerical results.

Key words: gravity walls anchored horizontally with flexible reinforcements, seismic wall-slope overall stability, horizontal slice method, quasi-static method, limit equilibrium