Abstract: (5765 Views)
Abstract
The prediction of active earth pressures is essential to the design of retaining walls in case of reinforced and
unreinforced soils. In this study, a new analytical method is presented to determine the coefficient of earth
pressure. The horizontal slice method is used to compute the active earth pressure behind a rigid retaining wall in
consideration of the granular soils. To verify the correctness of the suggested method, its results were compared
with those of existing studies. Results show that the developed formulation for non-cohesive soils has a good
agreement with the results of software simulations. Also, a new formulation for cohesive soils was presented and
its results were compared with the Rankine method. The effect of parameters such as the cohesion of soil mass,
the angle of internal friction and the angle of wall friction were assessed. In all cases, it is shown that the
horizontal slice method has good capability to predict the active earth pressure.
Received: 2006/12/7 | Accepted: 2008/11/6 | Published: 2011/03/7