The construction of geosynthetic reinforced soil (GRS) retaining walls has been rapidly increased in recent years. Researchers have extensively studied the static and dynamic behavior of the GRS retaining walls. However, many of these studies only considered the response of horizontal seismic loadings and ignored the response of vertical seismic loadings. In addition, several guidelines use only peak horizontal acceleration to analyze the reinforcement loads. Dynamic finite element analysis using the PLAXIS 2D program was performed in this study to investigate the seismic response of GRS retaining walls subjected to horizontal seismic loadings with or without vertical seismic loadings. The large-scale shaking table tests were used to validate the finite element procedure, and then a parametric study was carried out. Thirty ground motion records from five well-known earthquakes were used in this study. Besides the ground motions, the height of the wall was varied. The results were presented in terms of lateral facing displacements, maximum reinforcement loads, and intensity measures (IMs). The results showed that the lateral facing displacements generally increase with the increasing seismic input motions. The maximum lateral facing displacements and maximum reinforcement loads with vertical excitations were mainly larger than the GRS retaining wall without vertical excitations. Peak ground acceleration (PGA) might not be adequate to analyze the maximum reinforcement load, and this study recommended using Cumulative Absolute Velocity (CAV) or other intensity measures (IMs) based on velocity and displacement time history for designing the GRS retaining walls.

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