Abstract

Earth pressure on anchor plates is considered a viable resisting force for the design of underground structures. The theories available in the literature overestimate the earth pressure on these anchors, leading to unsafe design and perhaps loss of structures and lives. The present investigation is directed to study the passive earth pressure distribution as function of the stress history of the soil represented in terms of the overconsolidation ratio and the depth of embedment. The objective of this study is to validate the theories of Hanna and Khoury (2005) and to examine the case of earth pressures acting on anchor plate, which believed to receive little attention in the literature. Numerical models were developed using the finite element technique and the constitutive laws of Mohr-Coulomb for cases of retaining walls and embedded anchor plate in sand. The produced results reconfirmed the theories developed by Hanna and Khoury (2005) for the cases of walls retaining overconsolidated sand and walls retaining overconsolidated backfill overlying natural deposit