Fundamental Research on the Yield Strength of Soil Cement Wall Elements for Ground Retaining

Abstract

Recently, the number of applications of underground continuous soil-cement walls for ground retaining is increasing rapidly. However, the research in this field has not made almost anything clear yet and its theoretical explanation is lacking. The present research has been designed to learn the loading capacity characteristics of the soil cement section in a soil cement retaining wall. For this purpose, a full-scale model was constructed and a horizontal loading test was performed. The full-scale model was equivalent to a part of the soil cement retaining wall that could be obtained by cutting out the wall by 30cm of depth. The loading equipment was equipped with a loading plate that was fractionalized so that the load was distributed uniformly and the distortion in the loading direction was not restricted as far as possible.
The experimental results revealed that the ultimate failure is the shear failure and that the model exhibits such properties as if an imaginary parabolic arch seems to be formed in the soil cement section. The shear strength, which is a dominant element of the loading capacity, ranged approximately from 1/2 to 1/3 of the compressive strength.