Effectiveness of Geofoam cushion on seismic performance of retaining structures: Numerical study

In the last years, EPS Geofoam, which has extremely low density and high compressibility properties, is used to construct earthquake resistant infrastructure in seismic regions. In earthquake prone areas, retaining walls should be designed to resist the excessive dynamic lateral earth pressures. In this study, the effects of EPS geofoam cushion with different densities on seismic performance of retaining wall under two different earthquake motions were determined. Numerical analyses were performed by a finite element analysis program, Plaxis software. Results of parametric analysis were used to evaluate the effectiveness of cushion compared to the model without cushion. Numerical simulations with selected earthquake motions and EPS Geofoam with the different densities are compared. The comparative study showed that the Geofoam cushion can improve the seismic behavior of the retaining wall and the effectiveness of EPS Geofoam is highly dependent on the density of the material and the characteristics of earthquake motions.