Active Earth Thrust on Cantilever Walls in General Conditions

Abstract

The methods of Coulomb and Rankine are still the most widely used to compute earth active thrusts on walls. The former is prevalently used for gravity walls, the latter for cantilever walls. In contrast to Coulomb’s method, which can be used in a wide range of conditions, Rankine’s method has a very limited applicability and does not permit the solution of many practical problems concerning active thrusts on cantilever walls. This paper shows that the methods of Coulomb and Rankine, when used in the same conditions, give identical values of the active thrust coefficients. Then it proposes a new method, based on Coulomb’s approach, for evaluating active thrusts on cantilever walls in general conditions, which can solve a large variety of problems involving backfill with irregular topographic profiles, lines and strips of charge and whatever pore pressure distribution.