Earth pressures for a cohesive-frictional soil

These equations appear in chapter 5 of the coursebook:

pa ' 2c' K a qK a v ' K a p p ' 2c' K p qK p v ' K p

5.21

They are based on considering a cohesive-frictional soil at shear failure and find the major (passive pressure) and minor (active pressure) principal stresses at failure. Figure 5.13 gives the Mohr-Coulomb failure envelope for a cohesionless material; it shows how pa and pp are related to v. If we have a failure envelope for a c - material and draw Mohr circles at failure for a given vertical stress, v+ q, we have the diagram from which we can obtain equations 5.21. The interface is assumed to be smooth so that Ka and Kp are the values obtained from equations 5.2 and 5.5. When the interface is not smooth we use the appropriate Ka and Kp values, but the form of the equations is as in 5.21. Note the notation: lower case pa and pp indicate the pressure distribution against the wall. The vertical effective stress, v, increases linearly with depth and so too does the earth pressure. If it is the active or passive thrust against a wall of height H which is required, the integrated forms of the equations in 5.21 become:

Pa 2c K a H qK a H

1 K aH2 2
5.22

1 Pp 2c K p H qK p H K p H 2 2

Note the notation in this case: upper case Pp and Pa indicate the total thrust against a wall of height H. We could also obtain these by following the Coulomb wedge method used in the first part of the chapter, in other words these are generalisations of equation 5.3 and 5.6. Note also the similarity of equations 5.21 to:

q u cNc qN q 1 BN 2
For bearing strength the q is the vertical stress in the soil at the side of the foundation (the surcharge on the ground surface if the foundation is not embedded). For the earth pressure case q is the surcharge pressure on the surface of the backfill adjacent to the retaining wall (refer to equation 5.8). These equations are used in the worked example for the gravity retaining wall in chapter 6; refer to the sixth ultimate limit state on page 182 where the passive resistance of the embedded toe of the wall is calculated (the q term does not appear as there is no surcharge on the ground surface adjacent to the toe). The equations are also used for the embedded wall calculations in chapter 5 in Figs. 5.20b and 5.22 and example 5.8 in these cases there is no cohesion (as the material is sand) and no surcharge on the ground surface in front of or behind the wall. The above equation for the active and passive pressure distributions, indicate a linear with depth. The situation for passive conditions is shown diagrammatically in Fig. 1 over the page. I leave it to you to figure out how the diagram would look for the active pressure and thrust situations.

no surcharge

backfill surcharge pressure, q

' vKp 2c Kp

'

pressures

HK p 2c Kp qK p

'

2c ' KpH

Figure 1: Components of the passive pressure distribution and components of the passive thrust against a vertical wall given in equations 5.21 and 5.22.

The above equations deal with the effective stress case. What conclusion do you reach from the above diagram which has vKp on the left hand side and HKp on the right hand side? Equations 5.21 and 5.22 in the coursebook are for a c - soil. How would they be re-written for the = 0 material?

ba ck

Kp H 2

qK pH

fil l