Extension of Log-Spiral-Rankine (LSR) Model for Earth Pressure Analysis to a Sloping Backfill

Retaining walls are common geotechnical engineering structures constructed to maintain the stability of soil between two different ground levels. A large number of experimental, analytical and numerical studies have been carried out to estimate the magnitudes of earth thrusts acting on the walls (see, for example, [1], [2], [3] among others). Nevertheless, many of the existing methods oversimplified the problem (by, for instance, ignoring soil cohesion, assuming a linear failure surface, and/or presuming an unrealistic stress distribution in the backfill), and thus, can be applied only to limited scenarios. A recently published analytical model, known as the Log-Spiral-Rankine (LSR) method [4, 5] , dropped the aforementioned simplifications and outlined a more rigorous procedure which has been verified [6] to produce improved predictions over most of the existing analytical models. The LSR method, however, is currently limited to the scenario with a vertical wall retaining a levelled ground. The study presented here aims to generalize the LSR model to accommodate backfill and/or wall inclinations.