Ricerc@Sapienza

Seismic performance of slopes can be assessed through displacement-based procedures where earthquake-induced displacements are usually computed following Newmark-type calculations. These can be adopted to perform a parametric integration of earthquake records to evaluate permanent displacements for different slope characteristics and seismic input properties.

This paper describes a new procedure for the performance-based design of geosynthetic-reinforced earth-retaining walls (GREs) using the pseudo-static approach. In this procedure, the seismic coefficient k is calibrated against given levels of seismic performance, the latter typically expressed in terms of threshold values of the permanent displacements accumulated during the seismic event. An equivalence between the seismic-induced upper-bound displacements and the seismic coefficient k is obtained applying the Newmark’s