UPPER BOUND ANALYSIS OF EARTH PRESSURE ON RETAIN WALL USING RIGID FINITE ELEMENTS

Rigid finite elements are used to construct akinematically admissible velocity field. The objective function fordetermination of earth pressure contains some unknowns, subject to aset of linear constraints derived from the energy-work balanceequation, the Mohr-Coulomb failure (yield) criterion, the associated flowrule and a number of boundary conditions. The objective function withconstraints leads to a linear programming problem, which can be solved byan interior point algorithm. A classical earth pressure calculation caseshows that the presented method is of valid.