Permanent Displacement of Nailed Soil Slopes Subjected to Earthquake Loading

In-situ soil slopes and embankments are often reinforced with nails to improve their static and seismic performance. Michalowski and You (2000) developed an approximate method based on kinematic approach of limit analysis to estimate the permanent displacement of geosynthetic-reinforced soil slopes subjected to earthquake loading. In this paper, this approximate method is verified through finite element (FE) analysis of nailed soil slopes considering the soil and the nail as nonlinear and linear elastic materials, respectively. Radiation damping has been considered by using Lysmer-Khulemeyer (L-K) dampers at the soil boundaries of the FE model. Soil is assumed to be dry and cohesionless, and analyzed under plane strain conditions. The permanent displacements from approximate method and FE analysis have been compared. It is found that the displacements from FE analysis are considerably (more than 10%) less than those from approximate method.