Reliability of Passive Earth Pressure

Abstract

Reliability of passive earth pressure calculations in geotechnical engineering are usually performed using the Rankine theories of earth pressure. This paper uses the elasto-plastic finite element method to calculate the passive earth pressure, which can reflect the stress-strain relationship of the earth when the retaining wall begins to overturn. Besides, the covariance matrix decomposition method is used to generate random fields of soil in the study. Thus, Monte-Carlo based random finite element method (RFEM) is adopted here to perform the reliability of passive earth pressure in the study.