Upper bound limit analysis of active earth pressure with different fracture surface and nonlinear yield criterion

Conventional calculations of static and seismic active earth pressures of soils on a retaining wall are formulated assuming the soils obeying a linear Mohr–Coulomb yield criterion. However, experimental evidences show that the strength envelopes of almost all geomaterials are nonlinear in nature over a wide range of normal stresses. In this paper, the strength envelope of the backfill behind a retaining wall is considered to follow a nonlinear yield criterion. A simple method is proposed for calculating the static and seismic active earth pressures acting against a retaining wall using a nonlinear yield criterion. This method is based on the upper bound theorem of limit analysis. Both translational and rotational fracture surfaces are employed in the formulation for calculating active earth pressures. Quasi-static representation of earthquake effects using a seismic coefficient concept is adopted for seismic active earth pressure calculations. Instead of using directly the actual nonlinear yield criterion, a linear Mohr–Coulomb yield criterion, which is tangential to the nonlinear yield criterion, is used to formulate the active earth pressure problem as a classical nonlinear programming problem. A nonlinear sequential quadratic programming algorithm is used to search for the maximum solution. In order to assess the validity of the proposed method, values of active earth pressures for different values of seismic coefficients and nonlinear parameters in the yield criterion are calculated and compared with solutions obtained using an extended Rankine’s active earth pressure theory. For the case of static active earth pressure, the upper bound solutions using the present method with a translational fracture surface are equal to the extended Rankine’s theoretical solutions and are slightly smaller than those obtained using the present method with a rotational fracture surface. For the case of seismic active earth pressure, numerical results obtained using the present method with a rotational fracture surface is very close to the extended Rankine’s theoretical solutions. A study is conducted to investigate the effects of the parameters in the nonlinear yield criterion on the active earth pressures.