Amin Keshavarz

The plastic critical depth or the conventional tension crack depth has a considerable effect on the active lateral earth pressure in cohesive soils. In this paper the depth for c-ϕ soils has been evaluated in the seismic case using the stress-characteristics or slip-line method. The plastic critical depth was calculated on the basis of the theory of the stress-characteristics method and by considering the horizontal and vertical pseudo-static earthquake coefficients. The proposed solution considers the line of discontinuity in the stress-characteristics network. The earth slope, wall slope, cohesion and friction angle of the soil and the adhesion and the friction angle of the soil-wall interface were considered in the analysis as well. The results show that the plastic critical depths of this study are smaller than those of the other methods and are closer to the modified Mononobe-Okabe method. The effects of the wall and the backfill geometry, the mechanical properties of the soil and the pseudo-static coefficients were studied.