An elastic-plastic load transfer based method for cantilever diaphragm wall design

摘要

Cantilever wall design is conventionally carried out by considering a rigid plastic behavior of the soil that, on one side, simplifies the analysis however, on the other side, does not give the correct state of horizontal stress acting on the wall that is depending on wall movements. Furthermore no information are achieved about wall movements. Numerical procedures such as Finite Element Method allow to deduce a more realistic state of stress and deformation of the soil-wall system, anyway their use is justified only if a number of data on soil parameters and on groundwater conditions are available. In this paper a method for the analysis of a cantilever diaphragm wall is described. The proposed approach is based on the load transfer function concept. Elastic-perfectly plastic p-y curves are considered in the analysis and this allows to evaluate displacement-dependent horizontal normal stress acting on the wall as well as wall displacements. A closed form solution is presented and some parametric results are given in a non-dimensional form. Finally a comparison between the proposed method and a numerical analysis shows a good agreement.