A Critical Review of Full-Scale Shaking Table Tests Conducted on Reinforced Soil Retaining Walls - Reinforced Soil Engineering: Advances in Research and Practice - page 478

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A Critical Review of Full-Scale
Shaking Table Tests Conducted on
Reinforced Soil Retaining Walls
Hoe I. Ling
Columbia University, New York, New York, U.S.A.
1 INTRODUCTION
Results from several small-scale shaking table tests have been reported in the
literature. Most of them were conducted in Japan because of the availability of
testing facilities and also because seismic consideration is a stringent design
requirement in Japan. The most notable tests were that of the Japan Railway
Technical Research Institute (Murata et al., 1994) and the Public Works Research
Institutes (Matsuo et al., 1997). Both institutions conducted a series of model tests
in establishing design specifications for the then Ministry of Transportation
(railways) and Ministry of Construction (highways), respectively. The results
were used to verify limit equilibrium design procedures. The above tests were
limited to the Japanese version of reinforced soil structures. Koseki et al. (this
volume) conducted an additional study on reinforced soil walls following the
Kobe earthquake.
Matsuo et al. (1997) conducted reinforced soil models mostly of height 1m
having five cases of discrete panel wall facing and one case of continuous facing.
The length of reinforcement was 40% of the height, with one case of a ratio of
0.7. The vertical spacing was 20 cm. The models were subjected to a sinusoidal
wave ranging from 55 to 625 gal, having a frequency of 5 Hz. There was a case
where a real earthquake record was used with an amplitude of 506 gal.