Effects of Relief Shelves on Stability of Retaining Walls

Attaching shelf to retaining structure leads to a decrease in the total lateral earth pressure. This decrease enables the retaining structures to become more stable, to have small displacement, and to exhibit lower bending moments, the relief shelves effects are analyzed using FEM in order to understand how they stabilize cantilever wall in this study. Several models are varied by changing location and width of shelves to realize earth pressure and displacements of retaining wall. The displacement is getting smaller because earth pressure acting on shelf increases as shelves locations are lower and width is longer. The ground settlement variation effects caused by relief shelves are studied also. The ground settlement increases abruptly where shelf location is between of 0.5H and 0.625H, and settlement decreases suddenly where shelf width is between b/h=0.375 and b/h=0.500. The shelf significantly reduces earth pressure and movement of the wall. This decrease in the lateral pressure increases the retaining structure stability.