Rigorous Solutions of Classical Lateral Earth Pressures

Rigorous plasticity solutions for lateral earth pressures are presented in this paper by applying advanced upper and lower bound methods. The techniques, which were developed at the University of Newcastle, use finite element formulations of the limit analysis theorems and have been successfully applied to a number of geotechnical stability analyses in the past few years. For the cases analysed in this paper, the numerical lower and upper bounds typically bracket the true limit loads to within a few percent, and are therefore useful in design practice. These accurate bounds can be computed efficiently with a standard personal computer.