9 Types of Retaining walls and Uses, Advantages of Retaining wall

Table of Contents

A retaining wall is a structure designed and constructed to resist the lateral pressure of soil when there is a desired change in ground elevation that exceeds the angle of repose of the soil.

Retaining walls are used for supporting soil laterally so that it can be retained at different levels on the two sides.

Retaining walls are structures designed to restrain soil to a slope that it would not naturally keep to ( typically a steep, near-vertical, or vertical slope).

They are used to bound soils between two different elevations often in areas of terrain possessing undesirable slope or in areas where the landscape needs to be shaped severely and engineered for more specific purposes like hillside farming or roadway overpasses.

The most important consideration in the proper design and installation of a retaining wall is to recognize and counteract the tendency of the retained material to move downslope due to gravity.

It is important to have proper drainage behind the wall in order to limit the pressure to the wall design value.

Drainage material will reduce or eliminate the hydrostatic pressure and improve the stability of the material behind the wall.

Gravity wall depends on their mass to resist pressure from behind and may have a batter setback to improve stability by leaning back toward the retained soil.

For short landscape walls, they are often made from mortarless stone and segmented concrete units.

Dry stacked gravity walls are somewhat flexible and do not require a rigid footing.

Reinforced concrete and reinforced masonry walls on spread foundations are gravity structures in which the stability against overturning is provided by the weight of the wall and reinforcement bars in the walls.

A cantilever retaining wall is one that consists of a wall that is connected to the foundation. A cantilevered wall holds back a significant amount of soil, so it must be well engineered.

They are the most common type used as retaining walls. The cantilevered wall resists on a slab foundation. This slab foundation is also loaded by backfill and thus the weight of the backfill and surcharge also stabilizes the wall against overtaking and sliding.

Buttressed retaining walls are cantilever walls straightened with counter forts monolithic with the back of the wall slab and base slab.

The counterfort act as tension stiffeners and connect the wall slab and the base to reduce the bending moment in vertical walls of great height, counterfort is used spaced at distance from each other equal to or slightly larger than one half of the height counterfort is used for high walls with hight greater than 8 to 12 m.

Mechanically stabilized earth walls are those structures which is made using steel or geotextile soil reinforcement which is placed in a layer within a controlled granular fill.

Reinforced soil can also be used as retaining walls if they are built as an integral part of the design and to act as an alternative to the use of reinforced concrete or other solutions on the grounds of economy or as a result of the ground conditions.

Green retaining walls can be used to retain more gentle slopes. A Geo cellular structure such as a series of honeycomb cells can be embedded into the surface of the slope to stabilize it, and the individual cells can then be planted.

Mechanically stabilized earth walls are walls that can tolerate some differential movement. The wall face is infilled with granular soil whilst retaining the backfill soil. Advantages of the MSE wall, they don’t require a framework.

An anchored retaining wall can be constructed in any of the aforementioned styles but also includes additional strength using cables or other stays anchored in the rock or soil behind.

It usually drove into the material with boring, anchors are then expanded at the end of the cable, either by mechanical means or often by injecting pressurized concrete, which expands to form a bulb in the soil.

Also, Read