Shaking table test of the back-to-back reinforced soil walls with full-height rigid facing

An experimental study was conducted on shaking table tests of 1/4-scale back-to-back reinforced soil walls with full-height rigid facing. The reduced-scale model was designed according to the similitude relationships and excited using a series of sinusoidal input motions with increasing acceleration, to investigate the dynamic response of back-to-back reinforced soil walls with full-height rigid facing. The results indicate that the acceleration amplification factors on reinforced soil zone and retained soil zone increase significantly with increasing elevation and reach the maximum at the top of the wall. The maximum acceleration amplification factors under input motions with increasing acceleration amplitude can be divided into three stages, including stable stage, rising stage, and attenuation stage. The incremental maximum dynamic and residual facing displacements increase in a linear manner with elevation. For the input motion smaller than the critical acceleration, facing displacements are smaller, while facing displacements increase rapidly for the input motion exceeding the critical acceleration. In addition, the critical acceleration has an important influence on the deformation modes for back-to-back reinforced soil walls with full-height rigid facing. The incremental reinforcement tensile strains increase significantly with increasing input acceleration, and the incremental maximum strain in each reinforcement layer generally occurred near the connection in the lower layers and moved further inward along the height direction in the upper layers.