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DEM analysis of passive failure in structured sand ground behind a retaining wall

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Abstract

Assessment of active and passive earth pressures is of crucial importance in design of retaining structures. This paper aims to explore the progressive failure mechanism towards the passive state of natural sand ground, and to quantify the lateral earth pressure, resultant force and overturning moment on the retaining wall under both translational and rotational movement modes. A numerical modelling using the two-dimensional (2D) Discrete Element Method (DEM) is conducted with an advanced micro contact model considering the inter-particle bond strength of natural sand. Rankine theory based semi-analytical solutions of the lateral earth pressure and resultant force/moment have been proposed and compared with the numerical data. The results show that not only the wall movement mode but also the inter-particle bond strength has significant effects on the progressive formation of shear failure zone and mobilization characteristics of earth pressure. The larger the inter-particle bond strength is, the higher the lateral earth pressure can be mobilized, and hence more significant post-peak softening can be produced. The proposed solution can well describe the progressive mobilization of earth pressure towards the passive state and the post-peak softening state at rotational movement modes, potentially optimizing the design of retaining structures.

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Acknowledgements

The research has been supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China with Grant Nos. 51579178 and 51639008, which are all greatly appreciated.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Geotechnical Engineering, College of Civil Engineering, Tongji University, Shanghai, 200092, China

    Mingjing Jiang & Maoyi Niu

  2. Department of Civil Engineering, Tianjin University, Tianjin, China

    Mingjing Jiang

  3. State Key Laboratory for Disaster Reduction in Civil Engineering, Tongji University, Shanghai, China

    Mingjing Jiang

  4. Key Laboratory of Geotechnical and Underground Engineering of Ministry of Education, Tongji University, Shanghai, China

    Mingjing Jiang & Maoyi Niu

  5. Department of Engineering, Durham University, Durham, UK

    Wangcheng Zhang

  6. Institute for Geotechnical Engineering, ETH Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland

    Wangcheng Zhang

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  1. Mingjing Jiang
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Correspondence to Mingjing Jiang.

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Appendix

Appendix

A series of numerical biaxial compression tests were performed with a strain rate of 5%/min under five different confining pressures, i.e., 50 kPa, 100 kPa, 200 kPa, 400 kPa and 500 kPa. The grain size distribution is uniform in all specimens and provided in Fig. 16a in comparison with the Ottawa sand adopted by Wang and Leung [50]. To achieve computational efficiency, the DEM particles were enlarged by a certain scale maintaining almost the same grain size distribution curve with the realistic sands, as adopted in other studies [43, 46, 59, 60]. As has been investigated by [35,36,37], the magnitude of d50 would not make an appreciable difference to the strain localization patterns and the Eh − savg/h relationship, though a relatively large d50 can lead to a slightly increase of the shear band width and the peak resultant force Ep.

Fig. 16
figure 16

Properties of the used granular materials through DEM elementary tests in comparison with experiments by Wang and Leung [50]

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It can be seen from Fig. 16b–e that, the numerical results can well capture the cementation effect on the mechanical properties of granular soils: (a) the higher the cementation level, the higher the peak strength; (b) the residual strength is almost independent of the cementation level. Moreover, the peak friction angles (30.21º–31.73º, as listed in Table 1) from the numerical modelling is rather comparable to the experimental values (28.6º–32.1º).

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Jiang, M., Niu, M. & Zhang, W. DEM analysis of passive failure in structured sand ground behind a retaining wall. Granular Matter 24, 61 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10035-022-01220-y

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