Abstract
A new approach is proposed to evaluate the non-limit active earth pressure in c–φ soil based on the horizontal slices method and limit equilibrium method, which takes into account arching effect, displacement, mobilized friction angle, tension cracks, and shear stress of the horizontal layer. The accuracy of the proposed method was demonstrated by comparing the experimental results and other theoretical methods. The comparison results showed that the proposed approach was appropriate for calculating the non-limit active earth pressure in c–φ soil and cohesionless soil. A parametric study was undertaken to access the effects of cohesion, mobilized friction angle, and shear stress of the horizontal layer for the lateral earth pressure, as well as the effects of displacement for the rupture angle and tension cracks. Moreover, by comparing calculated results of the different theoretical methods and numerical model, it indicated that the empirical formulations of the mobilized internal friction angle and soil–wall interface friction angle used to cohesionless soil were still suitable for c–φ soil.
Highlights
An effective estimation of the lateral earth pressure is essential to the design of retaining walls for cohesive or cohesionless soil
Several laboratories and field results observed for retaining wall shown that the distribution of active earth pressure was nonlinear, and the lateral earth pressure behind the field wall was mostly in the intermediate state (Tsagareli 1965; Matsuo 1978; Bang 1985; Fang 1986; Zhou et al 1990; Yue et al 1992)
The results show that the potential rupture angle (β) continues to increase with displacement increase from a potential slip surface to the critical failure surface except for Rao’s method, calculated values of the proposed method is consistent with Rankine solution and Zhu’s method
Summary
An effective estimation of the lateral earth pressure is essential to the design of retaining walls for cohesive or cohesionless soil. Various research methods have been applied to calculate the displacement-dependent the lateral earth pressure and evaluate the working status of a retaining wall. These calculated methods of the lateral earth pressure considering the displacement mainly utilize a fitting method of measured data (Mei et al 2009; Ni et al 2018), a geotechnical parameter substitution method (Xu et al 2013; Wang et al 2015), and a linear model (Bang 1985; Golam et al.2015), but the arching effect is hardly still considered in these methods. An analytical procedure based on static limit equilibrium methods and horizontal slices method is applied to evaluate the non-limit active earth pressure considering the arching effect, displacement, horizontal average shear stress of soil slice and tension cracks
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