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Dynamic Earth Pressure PDF
Dynamic Earth Pressure PDF
Dynamic Earth Pressure PDF
Soil Dynamics
Retaining Walls: Failure Mechanisms
Gravity walls usually fail by rigid-body mechanisms:
Sliding: When sliding resistance is exceeded by lateral thrust
Overturning: bearing failure often involved
Gross instability: treated as slope stability problems
Composite walls (crib walls, MSE walls, etc) and cantilever walls can
fail in a similar way in addition to other internal failure mechanisms
such as reinforcement pull-out, reinforcement rupture, flexure, etc
Retaining Wall Failure Mechanisms
Where
Where
Where
For Example, kh may be taken between 0.1 to 0.12 for Addis Ababa
area and kv as 0.05 to 0.06 for a design earthquake return period of
475 years as per the new seismic code.
Dynamic Earth Pressure: M-O Method
Active Pressure Case
The critical slip surface is flatter than its static counterpart and given by
Where
The total active thrust can be split into the static and dynamic
components:
Where
The total passive thrust can be split into the static and dynamic
components:
Note: The dynamic component acts in
the opposite direction to the static
component, thus reducing the
available passive resistance
Dynamic Earth Pressure: Steedman-Zeng
Method
Steedman & Zeng (1990) incorporated the
dynamic behaviour of retaining walls in what is
referred to as a pseudodynamic approach
(see sketch)
They considered a fixed-base wall subjected
to a harmonic ground acceleration of ah sin t
It is easy to note that the acceleration and
mass of a differential element can be
expressed as
Dynamic Earth Pressure: Steedman-Zeng
Method
The total inertia force is found by integrating over the height
The first linear term is time independent and is thus the usual lateral
static pressure with the resultant acting at H/3 from the base
The second term is time dependent and hence is the dynamic
component.
Dynamic Earth Pressure: Steedman-Zeng
Method
A typical example of the height-wise
variation of the dynamic pressure for
kh=0.2 and H/λ=0.3 is shown in the graph
in comparison with that of M-O
approach
The pressure on the front side has also both hydrostatic and
hydrodynamic components
Effect of Water – Outboard of wall
The outboard hydrodynamic pressure is
estimated from Westergaard’s solution
(1931) for the problem of a vertical rigid
dam retaining a semi-infinite reservoir of
water excited by a horizontal harmonic
base motion (see figure)
Westergaard showed the hydrodynamic
pressure distribution and the resultant trust
are given by the following relations for an
excitation frequency smaller than the
fundamental frequency of the water mass
(𝒇𝟎 = 𝒗𝒑 Τ𝟒𝑯), which is mostly the case;
The hydrostatic and
where 𝒗𝒑 is the p-wave velocity of water
hydrodynamic
(=1400 m/s) pressures/trusts are
added up.
Effect of Water – Water in Backfill
Water in backfill can affect seismic load in three ways:
By altering the inertia forces within the backfill
By developing hydrodynamic pressure within the backfill
Through porewater pressure generation due to cyclic straining of the soil
The inertia forces developed depend on the relative movement of
the soil skeleton with respect to the water. Two cases arise:
Restrained porewater condition: this happens if the soil permeability, k, is
low enough (𝒌 ≤ 𝟏𝟎−𝟑 𝒄𝒎/𝒔𝒆𝒄: silty sand and finer), which is usually the case
with most fill materials. In this case, the inertia force is taken proportional to
the total soil unit weight.
Free porewater condition: this happens when the permeability of the fill is
high. In this case, the soil skeleton moves freely; thus, the inertia force is
taken proportional to the buoyant unit weight.
Hydrodynamic pressure is also developed in this case that must be
added to the inertial and hydrostatic pressure pressure to obtain the
total
Effect of Water – Water in Backfill
For restrained porewater condition, Matsuzawa et al
(1985) suggested the use of modifying parameters in
the M-O method of computing the active thrust; i.e.