On the displacement of a traditional retaining wall when first loaded

When the dimensions of the base of a retaining wall have been selected by, for example, some form of limit state analysis (Butterfield, 2012) an assessment ought also to be made of the displacement of the wall during its working life. This paper presents a simple rational means of doing so, illustrated by but not limited to, loads imposed during a conventional backfilling process. The analysis presented is an application of a vertical-displacement-hardening plasticity model incorporating nested interaction diagrams as yield functions together with a plastic potential and a hardening rule. The hardening rule, a key component of such a model, is assumed to depend only on the vertical centreline load V0 versus vertical displacement w0 relationship of the wall base. The model predicts that the horizontal, rotational and vertical displacements will be very simply inter-related; a prediction reinforced by the very satisfactory agreement obtained between it and the results from tests on a model footing supported on dense sand.