Yield acceleration of reinforced soil slopes

Calculation of permanent seismic displacement of reinforced soil slopes plays a very important role in proper and optimal design of these structures in earthquake-prone regions. In the Newmark's sliding block method, yield acceleration is required to calculate the permanent displacement. Pseudo-Static (PS) is an approximation method to compute yield acceleration. Unlike PS method, the pseudo-dynamic method considers the time and phase shift of P and S waves propagated in the soil. In this study, the yield acceleration of reinforced soil slopes is calculated using PS, Conventional Pseudo-Dynamic and Modified Pseudo-Dynamic (MPD) methods and the results are compared. The limit equilibrium analyses are conducted using the horizontal slice method by satisfying the equilibrium of the horizontal and vertical forces as well as moments. A program is written that is able to calculate the yield acceleration coefficient for all three mentioned methods for the uniform and variable spacing between reinforcements. The results show that, in general, the obtained value for the yield acceleration using MPD method is smaller than that in the PS method.