Effectiveness of foundation reinforcement on seismic performance of retaining walls

Soil reinforcement is a widely studied improvement method to improve the strength and stiffness of the soil. The primary goals of soil reinforcement are to increase the bearing capacity and decrease the settlement of the soil along with improving the strength of the soil. Geosynthetic soil reinforcement is founded on the idea of taking advantage of the characteristics of geosynthetic materials like the tensile strength of geosynthetic materials, the pressure distribution potential of geosynthetic materials, and the interlocking mechanism between soil and geosynthetic materials. Many studies in the literature focus on using geosynthetic materials in slopes, embankments, or soil foundations below footings. However, there is not any study focusing on the use of geosynthetic reinforcement under retaining walls. This study aims to investigate the effectiveness of geogrid-reinforcement on the seismic performance of the retaining walls under different earthquake motions by shaking table tests. The effects of the length of reinforcement (L) and the number of reinforcement layers (N) on the seismic performance of the retaining walls constructed on geogrid reinforced sand under the different earthquake motions were investigated.