Plate anchors are commonly employed as the foundation system for transmission towers,earth-retaining structures and offshore floating systems.A number of studies have been conducted in the past decades to examine the vertical uplift resistance of plate anchors,most of which were based on theoretical and numerical analysis or experiments under normal gravity level.In this study,centrifuge model tests incorporating half plate anchor models are performed to study the pull-out behavior of plate anchors in normally consolidated soft clay.The present study establishes that the pullout capacity factor of anchor reaches a limiting value of 12.54 when the anchor embedment ratio,denoting the anchor embedment depth over anchor width(H/B),exceeds 2.Particle Image Velocimetry(PIV)analyses were also conducted to investigate the soil flow mechanism during the uplift process.It is found that a general failure mechanism is operative when H/B is smaller than 2 and a localized failure mechanism with full soil back flow is observed for higher anchor embedment ratios.
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