ABSTRACT
For an irregular shaped excavation, walls deformation pattern is greatly affected by the concave and convex location. The vicinity of convex corners is a problematic zone, and causes problems in everyday practice. In this paper, a series of centrifuge model tests is conducted to investigate the impact of convex corners on the deformation of a soil-nailed walls, and to evaluate the influence of soil-nail layout on wall behavior. In this regard, an excavation with equivalent convex geometry, and different soil-nail layouts were considered, and results were compared with two-dimensional plane strain model. In each test, the centrifugal acceleration was increased gradually to the 40g-level. The observations indicate that deformation pattern of convex corners is thoroughly affected by soil nail horizontal inclination angle, Furthermore, the results show that wall facing plays an effective role in controlling the wall deformations with three-dimensional geometry.
