Investigation of the behavior of retaining walls for different earthquake design conditions

Retaining walls are engineering structures used to support an excavation, an existing slope or a filling area to be built, to hold the ground or when structures need to be built at different elevations. Stability and structural strength needs should be taken into consideration in the design of retaining structures. However, as is known, our country is located in a region where many fault lines pass. The mobility of these fault lines puts Turkey at high earthquake risk. For this reason, in addition to static effects, dynamic effects have a great effect on the structures built in our country. For this reason, in retaining wall designs carried out in our country, the design should be completed by considering dynamic effects. This study was conducted to investigate the behavior of retaining walls under different earthquake conditions due to the earthquake risk in our country. The acceleration and spectral acceleration values of 4 different earthquakes were used for the study. In the selection of earthquake records, the ground motion levels defined in the Turkish Building Earthquake Code (TBDY) 2018 were taken into account. These earthquakes are; 23 October 2011 Van earthquake (7.0), 20 February 2023 Hatay earthquake (6.4), 6 February 2023 Kahramanmaraş earthquake (7.6) and 13 March 1992 Erzincan (6.6). These earthquakes were applied to the retaining walls with the empirical method described in TBDY 2018 with the values obtained from the Disaster and Emergency Management Presidency (AFAD) and their behaviors were examined. In addition, the models examined with the empirical method were modeled and analyzed on the Plaxis 2D program. A total of 8 different models were calculated and their behaviors were examined, and the empirical method and Plaxis 2D results were compared.