Earth pressures with sloping backfill

Abstract

This paper presents experimental data of earth pressure acting against a vertical rigid wall, which moved away from or toward a mass of dry sand with an inclined surface. The instrumented retaining-wall facility at National Chiao Tung University (NCTU) Taiwan, was used to investigate the variation of earth pressure induced by the translational wall movement. Based on experimental data, it has been found that the earth-pressure distributions are essentially linear at each stage of wall movement. Both the wall movement required for the backfill to reach an active state and the wall movement needed for the backfill to reach a passive state increase with an increasing backfill inclination. The experimental active and passive earth-pressure coefficients for various backfill sloping angles are in good agreement with the values calculated by Coulomb's theory. It may not be appropriate to adopt the Rankine theory to determine either active or passive earth pressure against a rigid wall with sloping backfill.