Earth Pressures on Retaining Walls backfilled with Red Soil admixed with Building Derived Materials under Rotational Failure mode

ABSTRACT

Proper estimation of earth pressures plays a major role in assessing the stability of retaining structures. The present study proposes a sustainable and eco-friendly usage of building-derived materials (BDMs) mixed with red soil as a backfill for retaining walls under rotational failure mode. Small-scale laboratory model tests are conducted on a cantilever rigid retaining wall with different red soil–BDM blends as backfill. The width of the backfill is varied to assess its effect on the variation of earth pressures. The experimental results indicate that the earth pressures are not increased significantly by the inclusion of BDM to red soil, which suggests that BDM can be used as an effective lightweight backfill. The optimum pressure is obtained on mixing 20% BDM with red soil. It is observed that since the wall is rotated about its bottom end with the help of a hydraulic jack, the variation in magnitude of earth pressure is maximum near the top and decreased non-linearly with depth which is in contrast with the classical earth pressure theories. The experimental results also demonstrate that the failure planes are limited by the width of the backfill.

KEYWORDS:

• Model retaining wall
• earth pressures
• Building-derived materials (BDM)

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work is supported by the Department of Science and Technology (DST), Science and Engineering Research Board (SERB), Govt. of India through Early Career Research Award [Project ID: ECR/2016/000522].