Analyse and design embedded retaining walls of every common kind: steel U and Z sheet piles and trench sheets, combi walls with tube or H king piles, flat and corrugated prestressed concrete sheet piles, segmental precast piles spliced on site, timber, PVC and FRP sheeting, secant and contiguous bored piles, soldier piles with lagging, and diaphragm walls — cantilevered, anchored or propped. Set the ground and water, find the embedment by limit equilibrium for all five codes, play the staged excavation on elasto-plastic springs and watch the deflection, moments and support loads develop, size the section, splice the precast segments where the moment is low, design the anchors, struts and walings, check base heave, piping and settlement, and plan the installation. Take the A3 drawing set, the construction sequence with hold points and trigger levels, quantities, cost and an Excel workbook, or open the wall in Geotrix FEM.
Scope & limitations
Preliminary design for feasibility and education. Section libraries hold typical generic values — use the manufacturer's data. Confirm the ground model with site investigation, check critical walls by finite-element analysis and have the design reviewed by a qualified geotechnical engineer. The sample projects are synthetic.
What the retaining & sheet-pile wall studio does
Nine embedded wall systems with cantilever, anchored or multi-propped support: hot-rolled steel U and Z sheet piles and light trench sheets, combi walls (tube or H king piles with sheet infill), flat and corrugated prestressed concrete sheet piles, segmental precast piles spliced on site, timber sheeting, PVC and FRP sheet piles, secant and contiguous bored piles, soldier piles with lagging, and diaphragm walls. The original cantilever RC wall studio is kept as its own tab.
Earth pressure by Coulomb (wall friction, sloping backfill) and log-spiral passive (Lancellotta), Rankine or K0 with OCR, undrained total stress with a minimum equivalent fluid pressure, strip loads and steady seepage round the toe. Embedment by limit equilibrium — simplified fixed earth for cantilevers, free earth support for propped walls — with each code's design approach and unplanned over-dig, compared side by side for all five codes.
A staged beam on elasto-plastic Winkler springs follows the excavation, anchor stressing and strut installation, giving deflection, bending moment, shear, mobilised passive and support loads at every stage for characteristic and factored strengths; the embedment is deepened automatically until the factored run is stable and the service passive mobilisation is acceptable.
Section design with automatic sizing: steel bending, shear and axial with corrosion loss over the design life, combi king piles, concrete sections by strain compatibility with strands and bars, prestressed cracking moment, timber and polymer sheeting. Segmental precast piles get splice checks at every joint, a segment-length optimiser that keeps joints out of the high-moment zone, handling and driving stresses.
Anchors (fixed length, free length beyond the active wedge, tendon, deadman), struts (buckling) and walings; base heave, piping, uplift, vertical capacity, settlement behind the wall; drivability, vibration and noise; construction sequence with hold points, ITP and monitoring trigger levels; quantities and cost; an A3 drawing set, an Excel workbook with live formulas and a hand-off to Geotrix FEM.