Continue to Site

Eng-Tips is the largest engineering community on the Internet

Intelligent Work Forums for Engineering Professionals

  • Congratulations pierreick on being selected by the Eng-Tips community for having the most helpful posts in the forums last week. Way to Go!

How to Apply Load from Adjacent Building on New Retaining Wall?

Status
Not open for further replies.

emanyalpsid

Civil/Environmental
Oct 24, 2024
4
Hello people of eng-tips after a couple years of lurking I finally have a question that I cant find a previous post to help with. I am designing a retaining wall that is deeper than the adjacent footing of the neighboring building. Its not ideal but thats how it goes sometimes. I have been trying to figure out how the loads from the existing structure will be applied to the new retaining wall.

Since loads travel downward in a triangular path, would it make sense to load the wall with an additional active pressure (Im only familiar with EFP for retaining wall design) of (P/2)/D since half of the load will travel to the right away from the new wall? I browsed over some geotechnical textbooks but didnt find any examples of adjacent loading but if anyone has any good sources id be grateful for some info. Thanks
 
 https://files.engineering.com/getfile.aspx?folder=b82e76b6-b84a-498f-a7fb-7365636e9a4c&file=retainingquestion.png
Replies continue below

Recommended for you

Bowles - Foundation Analysis and Design - 5th Edition

Also search for Boussinesq Equation.

AASHTO adopts a form of the Boussinesq Equation for their adjacent surcharge formulas.
 
You have to hold that building up during construction. This seems to me to need either underpinning, driven sheeting, or a soldier pile and lagging wall. Depending on what is used you may or may not have pressure from that building exerted on your basement wall.
 
@structSU10 - theres temporary shoring designed by others so I still need to design for the loads after the shoring is removed

@Celt83 - thanks for the direction, I used boussinesq equation and applied it as a point load and summed all the point loads that would result from a line loading per ft of my wall. And then I noticed Enercalc has an adjacent footing option after all this and the answer from Enercalc is close to what I got so thats good that atleast I know now how its working.

Much appreciated
 
Just be careful with the Boussinesq equation I recall seeing many discussions in the past about what value should be used for Poisson's ratio ( μ )
 
Status
Not open for further replies.

Part and Inventory Search

Sponsor