Lateral Analysis of Retaining Wall

[jsburk0]

I am working on a project and am looking for some guidance from the group. I've been asked to run an L-pile analysis for a retaining wall that will be supported on a drilled pier foundation. The wall will consist of the drilled pier foundation tied together with a grade beam with pilasters extending up out of the grade beam. The only thing we've been asked to do is to analyze the deflection of the drilled piers. The wall will be placed in an area where creep is a concern. The soil depth is only about 4 feet before getting into weathered shale (able to be augered for a about 10 feet), then we cored 10 feet and there is a relatively steep downslope. My question is determining the loads to apply to the pile.

My initial thoughts are to model it having the pile head 4 feet out of the ground (neglecting the passive resistance from the down slope side because it will likely move away from the piles) and then have the embedment into the shale around 1.25 times the retained height. For the Shear Force, would I use the earth pressure down to the top of the pile and then have a distributed load behind the wall to simulate the 4 feet of soil? Also, would the moment be the summation of the forces acting on it (shear and distributed) multiplied by the distance from the bottom of the pile?

I hope I explained it well and would appreciate any comments.

Thanks

Joe

 

[EireChch]

Stick a sketch up which shows the structure you are proposing and provide information on the different soil layers and their associated parameters. Much more likely to get feed back with these included.