Effect of Structure Stiffness on Earth Pressure behind the Retaining System

Abstract

In current design practice, it is not clearly defined whether a “U” shape soil-retaining wall shall be designed for active or at-rest earth pressures. To resolve this issue, a study is initiated to better understand the earth pressure behind the “U” shape retaining wall system and investigate the structure stiffness effect on the earth pressure behind the wall. In the study, a series of soil-retaining structure interactive finite element models is created for both static and dynamic analyses. Unlike most of the soil-structure interactive finite element models used in many published investigations which assumed soil as a uniform continuous material, the models in this study use nonlinear boundary link elements along the possible soil failure surfaces to separate the soil into micro layers in order to catch soil discrete properties. Considering different retaining structure’s stiffness and boundary conditions, a series of static and dynamic (nonlinear time-history seismic) analyses are performed. This paper present details of finite element models, analysis results, summary and conclusions.