A New Method for Determination of 3D Active Earth Pressure of Unsaturated Backfills

Estimation of 3D earth pressure with inclined backfill surface considering seismic loads and suction effects

“…However, when the intricate soil suction and the ununiformly Semi-analytical approach is a promising way for these conditions. 20,21…”

“…To illustrate the roles of suction-related effects and the backfill configurations in seismic earth pressure estimations, the horizontal slice method pioneered more recently by the authors 21 is further modified here, as shown in Figure 3. To facilitate the analysis and computation, the whole soil block is divided into two portions, that is, soil blocks ABD and BCD, and therefore the total work rate becomes…”

“…The notations in the above equation resemble with those in Equation ( 12) and can be found in a previous work. 21…”

“…where c capi (z i ) and c capj (z j ) are capillary cohesion of the soil layer in soil block ABD and BCD, respectively; dA i and dA j are the slip surface corresponding to the infinitesimal element in soil block ABD and BCD, respectively. Detailed descriptions about these equations are available in Wang et al 21…”

“…The dispersion of layer number on the performance of the modified horizontal slice method has been checked. 21 m = 60 is used in the following comparisons. For a 3D cut slope, the solutions obtained by Antão et al 1 and by this paper are presented in Table 1 for comparison.…”