Many homeowners dream of leveling their uneven lawns. To achieve this, professionals add a retaining wall. Here are the main things to consider when designing a retaining fence for your yard.
When considering improving your landscaping, you should strongly consider building a retaining wall. There are several benefits to having a retaining wall, from reducing soil erosion to increasing the value of your property. Several will likely catch your attention and help you decide if a retaining wall is the appropriate next step in improving your landscaping.
Retaining Wall Design Considerations
When designing self-supporting retaining walls in Montreal, the following aspects must be studied:
- The stability of the ground around the wall
- The stability of the retaining wall itself
- The structural resistance of the wall
- Damage caused to adjacent structures by the construction of the wall.
The amount of earth pressure that will be exerted on a wall depends on the amount of movement the wall experiences.
For self-supporting retaining walls, it is usual to assume that sufficient outward movement occurs to allow active ground pressures to develop. The designer must ensure that adequate activity can occur without affecting the wall’s serviceability or appearance.
Where the required outward movement can’t occur due to the rigidity of the wall or foundation, higher pressures will develop, and the wall must be designed accordingly.
Other considerations
The possible occurrence of other design cases, or variations, caused by the construction sequence or future development of surrounding areas must also be considered. For example, consider additional live loads and any possible future earth removal in front of the wall in connection with services. This is valid if the passive resistance of this material is included in the stability calculations. The effect of excavation on the bearing capacity of the wall can also be considered.
To determine the soil pressure, it is usual to consider a unit of length of the wall cross-section and the retained soil. A measurement team is also used to design cantilever walls and other walls of uniform area.
Types of retaining wall
The term “retaining wall” literally means any wall whose function is to support any material, such as ore, water, cereals, earth, etc. However, as more distinctive terms such as dam, reservoir, and silo have been coined, common sense dictates that the word “retaining wall” only refers to walls retaining only earth.
Bordering Walls
- The walls bordering, on their periphery, the buried basements. They are not designed to be stable on their own. They only stabilize if maintained, primarily by an upper floor and secondarily by side walls. Therefore, to avoid the risk of collapse, you must only carry out backfilling without even creating the basement’s upper floor.
Independent walls
Walls are separate from the building or are sometimes attached to it. We can distinguish :
- Walls intended to support the land at the edge of properties—the walls are inside a property and allow the creation of terraces.
- The walls which border the access ramps to the garage located in the basement.
- Walls that are constantly held in place by tie rods. They are implemented to be self-stable.
Weight walls
This is the most classic type of support, the oldest, and the most commonly implemented. It is their highly significant weight that allows them to oppose the thrust of the earth.
They are generally rigid or semi-rigid structures and are equipped with a drainage system when their function is not to maintain the water level contained in the land to be supported. They are usually used to support excavated materials. In addition, they are easy to implement and integrate perfectly with the site in which they are carried out.
The materials that can be used for their production are:
- Masonry of jointed stone, unreinforced concrete, or cyclopean concrete (stone blocks or rubble embedded in concrete) cast in place
- Masonry of dry stones or unjointed stones and gabion
- Prefabricated elements in reinforced concrete or not (boxes filled with earth, blocks, beams, flower cells, etc.
Reinforced concrete walls or cantilever walls
They are very commonly used. They are characterized by an enlarged base embedded in the foundation soil’s upper part to support the backfill and its stability.
A reinforced concrete wall is embedded in the reinforced concrete foundation sole. The latter can be equipped with a spade to guarantee the wall’s stability against sliding in the case where the resistance of the ground and the footprint require that the width of the sole be small.…