Earthquake Resistance of Earth and Rock-Fill Dams. Report 5. Permanent Displacements of Earth Embankments by Newmark Sliding Block Analysis.

Abstract : In 1965, Newmark described methods for computing permanent displacements of embankments subjected to earthquake loading, and provided a chart for estimating the upper bounds of permanent displacements on the basis of a sliding block model and four earthquake records. Since that time, many additional strong-motion records have been obtained in the western United States, and it was decided to extend the data base for Newmark's chart by making use of these records. For this purpose, a computer program was written to integrate the digitized accelerograms and compute the permanent displacements from the velocity-time history and the resistance coefficients. All records were scaled to 0.5g peak acceleration and 30-in./sec peak velocity, and the resulting scaled permanent displacements are called standardized maximum displacements. A total of 169 horizontal and 10 vertical corrected accelerograms were processed in addition to several synthetic records.