Evaluation of bending moment and deflection of cantilever supported excavations

Abstract

In many conditions, because of several restrictions, cantilever walls are the only way to stabilize the excavations. It is no doubt that one of the most important parameters in design of such walls is wall stiffness. Therefore, in this study, a large number of case histories are collected and the most commonly used range of wall thickness and stiffness are determined based on this database. In addition, validation of limit equilibrium method (LEM) in granular soils showed that this method can only estimate bending moment of rigid walls. Therefore, for more accurate estimating, a new equation is presented for the most commonly used range of wall stiffness and various types of granular soils. Moreover, LEM based equation is replaced with a modified version. The new equation was successfully validated using 70 numerical models and results lied in range of 85% to 115% times the predicted values obtained from FEM. According to the results, in loose and very loose soils, the common cantilever walls can only stabilize the excavations with depth less than 10 m. While if depth is more than 15 m, soil type should be dense or very dense with “E” more than about 70 MPa. The results also show that the effect of wall stiffness is negligible in bending moments less than 2000 kN.m.

Keywords

• cantilever retaining wall
• bending moment
• deflection
• allowable depth
• wall stiffness
• granular soil