Calculation of earth pressure based on disturbed state concept theory

Abstract

The theoretical formulations of Coulomb and Rankine still remain as the fundamental approaches to the analysis of most gravity-type retaining wall, with the assumption that sufficient lateral yield will occur to mobilize fully limited conditions behind the wall. The effects of the magnitude of wall movements and different wall-movement modes are not taken into consideration. The disturbance of backfill is considered to be related to the wall movement under translation mode. On the basis of disturbed state concept (DSC), a general disturbance function was proposed which ranged from −1 to 1. The disturbance variables could be determined from the measured wall movements. A novel approach that related to disturbed degree and the mobilized internal frictional angle of the backfill was also derived. A calculation method benefited from Rankine's theory and the proposed approach was established to predict the magnitude and distribution of earth pressure from the cohesionless backfill under translation mode. The predicted results, including the magnitude and distribution of earth pressure, show good agreement with those of the model test and the finite element method. In addition, the disturbance parameter b was also discussed.

Calculation of Displacement-Dependent Active Earth Pressure for Deep Excavations in Soft Soil

“…Using the same approach, Xu et al [15] provided the mobilized shear strength for clay. In addition, the strength reduction method [16] and the disturbed state concept [17] have also been applied to calculate the mobilized shear strength. Second, various empirical functions have been proposed to fit the earth pressure-displacement relationship.…”

Constitutive Modeling of Physical Properties of Coastal Sand during Tunneling Construction Disturbance

“…Based on DSC theory, Liu et al [18] proposed a unified model to predict the compression behavior of structured geo-materials including clay, sand, calcareous soil and gravel, which was extended to characterize the deformation performance of the metal-rich clays by Fan et al [20]. Desai and EI-Hoseiny [19] and Zhu et al [21] investigated the field response of reinforced soil walls and the earth pressure of rigid retaining walls. Pradhan and Desai [22] characterized the cyclic response of sands and interfaces between piles and sands by locating the critical disturbance during deformation.…”

Computation of passive earth pressure coefficients for a vertical retaining wall with inclined cohesionless backfill

“…Several researchers have studied this problem using different methods such as limit equilibrium (Coulomb, 1776;Rankine, 1857;Terzaghi, 1943;Shields and Tolunay, 1973;Kumar and Subba Rao, 1997;Luan and Nogami, 1997;Soubra et al, 1999;Subba Rao and Choudhury, 2005;Reddy et al, 2013), limit analysis (Chen and Rosenfarb, 1973;Chen, 1975;Soubra, 2000;Soubra and Macuh, 2002;Antão et al, 2011), the method of characteristics (Sokolovski, 1965;Kumar and Chitikela, 2002;Cheng, 2003) and other numerical techniques such as the finite difference method (Benmeddour et al, 2012) and finite element method (Elsaid, 2000;Antão et al, 2011). Recently, the disturbed state concept was also used by Zhu et al (2011) to compute the passive earth pressure coefficients. As this is a somewhat new concept, their study was limited to a simple problem of a smooth vertical retaining wall with a horizontal cohesionless backfill.…”