Seismic behavior of DSRWs: influence of the input motion

Dry stone is a millennia-old construction technique that involves assembling roughly shaped stones without any binding agent to erect a structure. Several studies have tried to develop a design guide for such walls that retain slopes. However, the absence of finalized seismic design rules has been identified as one of the barriers to the emergence of new projects using this technique. Herein, the study proposes to revisit the numerical modeling of scaled-down experimental tests from the literature using a true 3D numerical tool in order to have a better insight onto the dynamic behavior of such walls. First, the model is validated against pseudo-static scaled-down tests. Subsequently, the model gives insight into the dynamic behavior of retaining walls subjected to harmonic synthetic signals. The 3D model is further used to evaluate the influence of the main characteristics of harmonic signals on the dynamic response. If the role of the harmonic signal frequency and the duration of the strong phase are known, the results demonstrate the significant impact of other signal properties such as the shape of the signal's descending phase while a negligible influence of the slope of the signal's ascending phase is found.