Gravity Retaining Wall Design Example

In this example the structural design of the three retaining wall components is performed by hand.

Gravity retaining wall design example.

Gravity retaining walls are earth retaining structures that depend primarily on their own self weight and that of any enclosed material to support the retained ground and any structures or loads placed upon it. Pilaster masonry walls 19. Restrained non yielding walls 20. F c 3000 psi fy 60 ksi natural soil development of structural design equations.

Construction topics and caveats 24. 8 3 2 1 gravity retaining walls gravity wall dimensions may be taken as shown in fig 8 3 a. Flexural and shear stresses in gravity retaining walls will almost always be of minor importance. Walls formed from interlocking concrete blocks are designed as gravity walls defined in bs 8002 2015 as follows.

Sheet pile walls 21. Cantilevered tilt up walls 13. Swimming pool walls 18. Soldier pile walls 22.

The wedge is defined as the soil which extends beyond the failure. The base and other dimensions should be such that the resultant falls within the middle one third of the base. Two equations are developed. Wood retaining walls 14.

For a detailed discussion of design and analysis parameters the design manual for segmental retaining walls ref. Gravity walls generally are trapezoidal in shape but also may be built with broken backs. Sketches of the retaining wall forces should be considered to properly distinguish the different forces acting on our retaining wall as tackled in the previous article retaining wall. 1 should be consulted.

Setback sliding wedge. 14 1 1 wall development process. Ce 437 537 spring 2011 retaining wall design example 1 8 design a reinforced concrete retaining wall for the following conditions. Weight of the concrete in a gravity wall pro vides stability against overturning.

Gravity retaining wall design can be greatly simplified t h r ough the use of a series of sample designs deve l o p e d recently by the po r tland cement association pca. Pre sented in tabular form the designs are for wall heights. Flexural and shear stresses are checked in the second design example and it is seen that the magnitudes are very low. Although wall heights up to 8 ft 2 44 m for conventional gravity walls and 14 ft 4 28 m for soil reinforced walls are presented properly engineered walls can exceed these heights.

A retaining wall that relies solely on it s own weight to stand up is called a gravity wall allan block combines the basic engineering principles of setback leverage and total unit mass with simple mechanics to make highly stable gravity walls. How retaining walls fail. Segmental retaining walls 17. Every retaining wall supports a wedge of soil.

Based on our example in figure a 1 we have the forces due to soil pressure due to water and surcharge load to consider. The top width of the stem should be not less.