Design of retaining walls in clay is typically based on ultimate limit state calculations to prevent collapse, with arbitrary factors of safety used to limit deformations. These factors of safety do not take into account the different rates of strength mobilisation in the wide variety of clays found worldwide. As there is substantial uncertainty in this approach, conventional design tends to lead to excessive conservatism with associated high cost. The novel analysis procedure based on the fraction of the strength of soil mobilised for a given wall displacement developed here allows rapid assessment of wall deformations and stresses by way of a simple two-parameter constitutive model which can be easily calibrated using conventional triaxial data. The model is validated based on field and model case histories with a variety of different clays and propping conditions and is shown to exhibit good performance in predicting the behaviour of published case histories based on soil parameters extracted from previously published soil test data. This novel analysis provides for the first time a route for practising engineers to carry out fast, efficient design at early stages of the design process by considering many potential wall geometries without the computational overhead of complex finite-element or finite-difference numerical models.

中文翻译：

---

粘土柔性挡土墙的设计方法

粘土中挡土墙的设计通常基于极限极限状态计算，以防止坍塌，同时使用任意安全系数来限制变形。这些安全因素没有考虑到全世界发现的各种粘土中不同的强度动员率。由于这种方法存在很大的不确定性，因此传统的设计往往会导致过度的保守性以及相关的高成本。在此基础上开发的基于给定壁位移动员的土壤强度分数的新颖分析程序，可以通过简单的两参数本构模型快速评估壁的变形和应力，该模型可以使用常规三轴数据轻松进行校准。该模型基于具有各种不同黏土和支撑条件的田间和案例实例历史进行了验证，并显示出基于从先前发布的土壤测试数据中提取的土壤参数来预测已发布案例历史的行为表现出良好的性能。这种新颖的分析首次为实践中的工程师提供了一条途径，使他们可以在设计过程的早期阶段通过考虑许多潜在的墙体几何形状而进行快速，高效的设计，而无需计算复杂的有限元或有限差分数值模型。