Relative soil/wall stiffness effects on retaining walls propped at the crest

Abstract

This thesis is focused on developing a practical design method, with reference to Eurocode 7 (EC7,1995), for retaining walls propped at the crest, which satisfies safety against collapse and serviceability requirements and incorporates both the real nature of soil behaviour and the wall flexibility.

For stiff walls, the rotation of the wall at the prop and the normalized prop loads, bending moments and deformations have been calculated for a range of values of retained height ratios, initial earth pressure coefficients and soil stiffness.  The relative soil/wall flexibility has been quantified by means of a critical flexibility ratio that distinguishes a stiff from a flexible system.

The method is applied to flexible walls by idealising the wall flexibility into a simple mechanism and introducing new kinematically admissible fields to associate the mobilized shear strain with the mobilized shear strength in each soil zone by a hyperbolic relationship.  The results are compared to those derived from Eurocode 7 (EC7, 1995) and are presented in curves to illustrate any differences.  The advantage of this solution is that both the wall flexibility and the soil stiffness are considered in a simple calculation and it can be applied in a reasonably general manner.

The validity of this method has been assessed by comparison to results presented in previous research and to published data obtained from monitored case histories.  The method can provide reasonably accurate results and is an improvement to linear elastic soil models or empirical techniques and thus can be a useful design tool.

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