Study Of Earth Pressure On Cantilever Retaining Wall

Cantilever retaining wall is one of the familiar light retaining wall in domestic in recent years. It is widely used in water conservancy, highway, railway, landscape engineering and other projects because of its simple structure, economical and practical and beautiful designed. The past earth pressure calculation method of cantilever retaining wall is to take the attachment of wall heel points with wall vertices or the vertical plane of wall heel point as an imaginary wall back,then calculate the earth pressure of imaginary wall back with Rankine’s and Coulomb’s earth pressure theory. This method which based on certain assumptions and ignore the emergence of rupture surface in the landfills is inconsistent with the actual situation of engineering. With considering the emergence of rupture surface in the landfills of cantilever retaining wall, the earth pressure situations under active and passive limit states are researched in this paper.(1).In the active and passive limit states, there are two rupture surfaces engendered in landfills of cantilever retaining wall. The shape of the sliding soil wedge can be determined by comparison between the second rupture surface angle and the wall angle:triangle sliding soil wedge and quadrilateral sliding soil wedge.(2).By using the method of level layer element, the formulae of active and passive earth pressure coefficients, distributions and height of its resultant application point on cantilever retaining wall are analyzed when the triangle sliding soil wedge appears in backfills. The comparisons with Rankine’s and Coulomb’s earth pressure theory and experimental result show that the computed result is more accordant with the experimental result.(3).The active and passive earth pressure formulae is obtained by the method of level layer element when the quadrilateral sliding soil wedge appears in backfills. With the extreme value theory of active and passive earth pressure, the second rupture surface angle is figured out by using of macro-pattern mathematical software-MATLAB.(4).According to the gotten second rupture surface angle, the active and passive earth pressure coefficients, distributions and height of its resultant application point on cantilever retaining wall are analyzed and compared with the Rankine’s and Coulomb’s earth pressure theory and experimental data.