Research Note:: Determination of Active Earth Pressure for Reinforced Retaining Walls in c-) Soils

The prediction of active earth pressures is essential to the design of retaining walls in case of reinforced and unreinforced soils. In this study, a new analytical method is presented to determine the coefficient of earth pressure. The horizontal slice method is used to compute the active earth pressure behind a rigid retaining wall in consideration of the granular soils. To verify the correctness of the suggested method, its results were compared with those of existing studies. Results show that the developed formulation for non-cohesive soils has a good agreement with the results of software simulations. Also, a new formulation for cohesive soils was presented and its results were compared with the Rankine method. The effect of parameters such as the cohesion of soil mass, the angle of internal friction and the angle of wall friction were assessed. In all cases, it is shown that the horizontal slice method has good capability to predict the active earth pressure.