Investigation of the seismic performance of reinforced highway embankments

Embankments which are quite stable under static load conditions can simply collapse during earthquakes due to the destructive seismic loading. This situation poses a high sequence thread to the structural integrity of the embankment, service quality and serviceability. The objective of this thesis is to determine the effect of the geosynthetic reinforcement on the seismic performance of the highway embankments and evaluate the seismic performance of the geotextile reinforced embankment under different earthquake motions. A 1/50 scale highway embankment model is designed and reinforced with geosynthetics in order to increase the seismic performance of the embankment model. A series of shaking table tests were performed for the identical unreinforced and reinforced embankment models using dynamic motions with different characteristics. The experimental results were evaluated comparing the unreinforced and reinforced cases. Results revealed that reinforced embankment models perform better seismic performance especially under specificied dynamic motions used in this study. Also, the prototype embankment was numerically modelled using the software PLAXIS 2D 2012. It is seen that seismic performance trend of the numerical simulations are close to that of the experimental results.