LIMIT LOADS FOR AN ANCHOR TRAPDOOR EMBEDDED IN AN ASSOCIATIVE COULOMBSOIL/

A methodology for determining the plane strain limit load acting on an anchor or trapdoor buried within a purely associative Coulomb soil is presented. True lower bounds derived from a family of limiting stress fields appropriate to shallow horizontal trapdoors and anchors are sh own to correlate to within less than 1 percent of upper bounds availab le in the literature, permitting the true limit load to be almost exac tly defined. The solution form alters for deeply buried anchors and tr apdoors resulting in poorer correlations. Methods by which the work ma y be extended to cover the more practical instances of non-associative Coulomb soils are indicated but are beyond the scope of the current p aper. (C) 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.