One of the priority areas of theoretical research in the field of building structures is to reduce their own weight at a given resource - rationalization. There is a certain number of building structures in which the form and nature of the external load are interdependent. The most striking representative are the structures that perceive lateral pressure from bulk material - retaining walls. From the above review of modern scientific research aimed at finding rational parameters of retaining walls, it follows that the authors, as a rule, describe the cantilever retaining wall by a finite number of parameters and the reduction of its own weight or cost of the structure was taken as the target function. In this case, the load on the structure does not change.
The idea underlying this work is that the structure of the retaining wall and the soil backfill, which holds it, is considered as a single system. In this system, the configuration of the structure determines the nature and magnitude of lateral pressure distribution. The sequence of actions to solve the problem of searching for a rational configuration of the structure leads to the division of the curved foam wall into a finite number of linear sections. The anchor support is represented in the form of an additional concentrated force applied at the anchor fixing point. In the work the dependences between the attributes of the stress-strain state of the structure and the system of angles of inclination of the sections are constructed. The configuration of the anchor and retaining wall, which will minimize the potential deformation energy of the system, is found within the framework of the BEA method. Using the numerical output data, the validity of the proposed method is demonstrated. The realization of calculations is reduced to the search for the extremum of the objective function of n variables where the potential deformation energy acts as a functionb and the combination of angles of inclination of the system's breakdown sections as variables. The solution of the problem is implemented by the conjugate gradient method. as a result of calculations, an image of the structure is obtained that minimizes the introduced criterion.
Keywords: retaining walls, deformation energy, curved surfaces, rationalization.