Critical embedment depth of a rigid retaining wall against overturning in unsaturated soils considering intermediate principal stress and strength nonlinearity

The overturning stability is vital for the retaining wall design of foundation pits, where the surrounding soils are usually unsaturated due to water draining. Moreover, the intermediate principal stress does affect the unsaturated soil strength; meanwhile, the relationship between the unsaturated soil strength and matric suction is nonlinear. This work is to present closed-form equations of critical embedment depth for a rigid retaining wall against overturning by means of moment equilibrium. Matric suction is considered to be distributed uniformly and linearly with depth. The unified shear strength formulation for unsaturated soils under the plane strain condition is adopted to characterize the intermediate principal stress effect, and strength nonlinearity is described by a hyperbolic model of suction angle. The result obtained is orderly series solutions rather than one specific answer; thus, it has wide theoretical significance and good applicability. The validity of this present work is demonstrated by comparing it with a lower bound solution. The traditional overturning designs for rigid retaining walls, in which the saturated soil mechanics neglecting matric suction or the unsaturated soil mechanics based on the Mohr-Coulomb criterion are employed, are special cases of the proposed result. Parametric studies about the intermediate principal stress, matric suction and its distributions along with two strength nonlinearity methods on a new defined critical buried coefficient are discussed.