Anchored retaining walls in granite residual soils II. A method for preliminary design

In a companion paper, an extensive parametric study regarding anchored retaining structures was presented, contributing to better understand the behaviour and most relevant parameters regarding their design. Based on those results, a novel and simple methodology for preliminary design is presented, providing an alternative procedure for preliminary design and implementation of the observational method. The methodology consists on the following four steps: definition of the properties of the excavation to be analysed – target excavation; selection, among all the excavations simulated in the parametric study, of the reference excavation, that acts as a starting point; calculation of all the correction factors; prediction of the bending moments and movements of the target excavation. The paper finishes with the application of the proposed methodology to several examples of increasing complexity, allowing to show how the method is applied and simultaneously demonstrating its potential for practical purposes.