Berlin-type retaining walls with external soldier piles: numerical performance evaluation

Abstract

Urban excavations are occasionally performed with the support of Berlin-type retaining walls with soldier piles external to the concrete wall. This solution is usually justified by the difficulty in drilling holes tangent to the walls of contiguous buildings. Besides the greater exposure to impacts from equipments circulating inside the excavation, the behaviour of such soldier piles will always be less adequate than the one of piles inside the concrete wall. In this paper an excavation using a Berlin-type retaining wall is numerically modelled considering two possibilities: one in which soldier piles are incorporated in the wall and another with external soldier piles. The results are compared with emphasis on the stresses on the soldier piles. The factors related to pile-wall connections which influence the most the performance of the structure are analised.