ABSTRACT
Soil arching can occur due to the existence of buried structures inside a soil body. This arching can lead to an increase or decrease in soil pressures attracted to the buried structures, which cannot be accurately estimated by simply considering the self-weight forces generated by the prism of soil supported by the structure. The relative stiffness between the structure and the surrounding soil is the main factor that controls these soil pressures. This paper presents centrifuge and numerical results of two rotated box structures used to investigate the effect of different wall thicknesses on the contribution to the overall loads attracted to the structure. Results of comparative numerical analyses using PLAXIS are presented to aid the interpretation of the tests. Load reductions were found to occur for the most flexible portions of the structures (up to 20%) and both the individual flexibility of the members and the overall structure were found to be important.
