Granular materials have a tendency to exhibit an arching effect by which the load is transferred from yielding parts to adjacent stationary parts. Retaining walls are among those structures that the soil arching plays an important role in the distribution of earth pressures. This paper briefly reviews the development of soil arching theory and its application to different geotechnical projects....

In the current paper results of a well instrumented experimental procedure for studying the arching effect in loose and dense sand are presented. The apparatus comprises concentric circular trapdoors with different diameters that can yield downward while stresses and deformations are recorded simultaneously. As the trapdoor starts to yield, the whole soil mass deforms elastically. However, afte...

In the current paper the results of a numerical simulation that were verified by a well instrumented experimental procedure for studying the arching effect over a trapdoor in sand is presented. To simulate this phenomenon with continuum mechanics, the experimental procedure is modeled in ABAQUS code using stress dependent hardening in elastic state and plastic strain dependent frictional harden...

The observation of failure surfaces within column supported embankments is critical to understanding how the embankment stresses are transferred towards heads. In this study, finite element simulations utilising a strain softening constitutive model, non-local regularisation and Arbitrary Lagrangian-Eulerian formulation used examine these over various geometries. This methodology offers insight...