Dynamic Passive Earth-Pressure Problem

An incremental method is proposed for the study of stress and strain fields in a dynamic passive earth-pressure problem, where an initially vertical retaining wall is considered to translate or rotate with specified acceleration into a dry loose sand medium. The proposed incremental approach of this work enabled us to treat the problem of dynamic passive earth pressure as a mixed boundary value problem. At the beginning of the wall displacement, the dynamic normal earth pressure distribution is generally larger than the static pressure distribution. The dynamic mass ratio at the beginning of the wall displacement is shown not to depend on the amount of wall movement nor on the wall acceleration.