Earthquake resistant design of reinforced concrete retaining walls considering the project location change effect

Abstract

In this paper, the design process of reinforced concrete retaining walls is investigated under the issue of “project location change effect” which becomes a significant requirement to assess the earthquake resistant design depending on the new Turkish Building Earthquake Code-2018 (TBEC-2018). Within this context, in the light of the related code, fourteen different districts which are located in the Anatolian Side of Istanbul Province (Turkey) have been taken into consideration, to search for also the effects of the supported earth fill depth, the unit weight and the shear strength angle of surrounding soil and the external loading conditions. In this way, it has been aimed to focus on the application details of the design code and reflect the outcomes of the analysis in terms of the changes that happened in wall dimensions depending on the locations of project. Besides, with this study, it is aimed to reveal that the definition of type sectional wall will not be possible with the new code. As the result, the influence rates of the investigated project variants have been explained considering site-specific retaining wall design in terms of integrated relations of the design parameters.