Browsing by Author "Rathnayake, Hasini Sumuditha"

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    Structural Behaviour of Masonry Arch Retaining Walls
    (2024-06-19) Rathnayake, Hasini Sumuditha; Shrive, Nigel Graham; Duncan, Neil Alexander; Wong, Ron Chik-Kwong; Sudak, Leszek Jozef; Malomo, Daniele
    Recently, a novel experiment explored the possibility of employing low-rise arch masonry walls to resist earth pressure. The system proved to have several advantages: minimal deflection, ease of construction, cost-effectiveness, and aesthetic appearance. The authors established that the idea could work but did not study the influence of any of the parameters involved. To address this limitation and to further investigate the performance of arch masonry retaining walls, six masonry arch walls were constructed using half-scale concrete blocks and modular cored bricks. The test walls had an equivalent span of 2 m and two different span-to-rise ratio, 0.17 and 0.35. The walls were built inside a rigid concrete tank, and the arch bases were cemented to the concrete base with a mortar joint. Arches were subjected to soil pressure and surcharge load: displacements and strains were measured. The walls demonstrated stability and maintained their structural integrity without significant lateral deformations. The experiment yielded successful results, as the arch masonry walls exhibited deflections less than 0.1% of the backfill height. A simplified finite element micromodel has been developed using ABAQUS software to simulate and study the structure in detail, allowing variation of the parameters intrinsic to such walls. The influences of the rise-to-span ratio, height, and grouting pattern on the performance of the arch were explored. For a given wall width, a curved hollow arch wall profile was found to increase the maximum sustained pressure more so than grouting a flat wall: for the same height and span, a curved hollow arched wall with a rise-to-span ratio of 0.25 resisted 37% more pressure than a grouted planar wall. Thus, by combining the information obtained from the experiment and the numerical modelling, masonry arch retaining walls may be seen as an economical and stable alternative to conventional methods of constructing earth-retaining structures.