Stresses Within Granular Materials Contained Between Vertical Walls

Abstract

Arching is an important phenomenon that has to be understood when designing backfilled trenches, storage silos and underground mine stopes supporting granular materials. Here, a significant fraction of the fill load is carried by the wall friction and hence the load transferred to the bottom of the fill is substantially reduced. The objective of this paper is to present three different approaches, namely, analytical, experimental and numerical, to study the vertical normal stresses within a granular material contained between vertical walls. The laboratory model discussed herein is an effective tool in deriving the variation of shear stress on the wall and the average normal stresses with depth. It is shown that the analytical and numerical models that treat the granular material as a continuum suggest an asymptotic vertical normal stress that is reached at certain depths, whereas the laboratory model tests show that the vertical stresses increase continuously even at very large depths.