Published Paper Details:

Retaining walls are an integral part of almost all infrastructure projects, to support vertical or near vertical backfills. As the sectional dimensions of retaining wall are function of lateral earth pressure on wall, so reducing the lateral earth pressure on wall with also reduce the sectional dimension of the wall and will leads to overall economy to the structure. Construction of relief shelves at various elevations.into the backfill use of tire chips as light weight backfill provision of compressible inclusion are some of the techniques used by several researchers to achieve the reduction of earth pressure on retaining wall.A similar study has also investigated the possible reasons behind the failure of a cantilever retaining wall with relief shelves, which is located in the heart of Hawassa city, Ethiopia and also laid suitable relief shelf parameters by using computational tool. To study the influence of relief shelf on lateral earth pressure distribution on wall, 1-g small scale,physical model tests are carried out in a stainless steel tank having dimensions of 1.2m length, 0.31m width and 0.7m depth. Present study examines the effectiveness of relief shelves on lateral earth pressure reduction, which has concluded that provision of relief shelves on non-yielding rigid retaining wall provides significant amount of reduction in total thrust on wall by means of small scale physical model tests and numerical analysis. For retaining wall of 8m height having surcharge of 50kPa placed at 0.5m away from wall face, provision of 3 relief shelves having width ranging from 0.4-1.8m can reduce total thrust in range of 4-27.5%.