Abstract
After the recent large earthquakes like the 1995 Hyougoken-Nanbu earthquake in Japan or the 1999 Chi-Chi earthquake in Taiwan, several series of model tests have been conducted to investigate the seismic behavior of reinforced soil retaining walls (RWs), while they did not focus on the effect of subsoil conditions under RWs. In this study, therefore, two types model reinforced soil RWs were constructed with and without inserting a steel plate wrapped with teflon sheet at the interface between the reinforced backfill and the subsoil, and model shaking table tests using a sinusoidal wave were performed to investigate the effect of the teflon sheet on the behavior of RWs. As a result, the RW without the teflon sheet tilted predominantly, those with the teflon sheet slid predominantly. Tensile forces mobilized in the reinforcements were also affected by such a different displacement mode.
