Pull-out behaviour of vertical plate anchor in granular soil

Abstract

In this paper, the pull-out behaviour of a vertical plate anchor in sand is investigated. Load-carrying capacity and failure displacement of the anchor are found to be significantly influenced by its embedment depth and the density of the fill soil. It is observed that a vertical anchor at shallow depth exhibits clear failure with the failure plane reaching out to the ground surface, whereas at deeper embedment the soil is subjected to constrained plastic deformation leading to localised failure around the anchor. The critical embedment depth beyond which anchor behaviour tends to shift from general to local shear mode is found to be 7h in the case of dense soil and 5h in the cases of medium dense and loose soils, where h is the height of the anchor plate. The proposed regression model is reasonably good in predicting the load-carrying capacity of the vertical anchors under pull-out.