A COMPUTER PACKAGE ON DESIGN OF RETAINING WALLS

Abstract

Retaining wall is a very important and widely used structure especially in construction and maintenance of highways. Hence designing retaining walls with adequate safety and economy deserves attention. Experience has shown many advantages of using computer programs with interactive graphics facility. A great deal of valuable time in designing and analysing the retaining wall can be saved. Graphics package reduces the drafting time and the results in the form of graphics give the designer better feel of design. Hence, the present effort is directed towards the development of a user-friendly interactive program 'RETAIN' for design and drafting of reinforced cantilever and gravity retaining walls. The package is developed and implemented on microcomputers. The program is interactive and uses graphics facility of TURBO C++ to display full details of retaining wall in pictorial form and is sophisticated and efficient enough to take into account different soil and loading conditions that are usually encountered in practice. It makes pseudo dynamic analysis of retaining wall to take into account the seismic effect by making use of IS:1893 - 1984 provisions. Earth pressures due to backfill,point load,line load,strip load,earthquake,surcharge pressure and water table are accounted for in the design. The detailed design of stem , toe and heel for cantilever wall conforms to the IS:456 - 1978 requirements. Parametric studies carried out by solving a number of problems _using the `RETAIN' shows that, accumulation of water at the backfill due to inadequate drainage is a more severe loading condition than the earthquake condition. It is also observed from the study that point loads in the forms of column loads, strip loads in the form of continuous walls or roads very close to the wall may result in significant increase in the wall dimensions to satisfy, stability requirement.