The idea for the paper arises from the evolution of the interpretation of the soil’s shearing resistance, which later reflects in the calculation of earth pressures and the design of retaining walls. There, according to the National Annex to Eurocode 7 (EC7), only the active, not the passive earth pressure, is considered. Namely, although traditionally the failure envelope of the Mohr’s stress circles for soils is adopted as linear and inclined, in the scientific community, it has increasingly been treated as a non-linear function. Therefore, within the paper, their analysis and comparison is carried: a theoretical review is given for the linear and non-linear failure envelopes, after which a methodology for determination and application of non-linear shearing resistance in software is described, offering possibility for comparison of results for the amounts of active earth pressure forces (Ea) obtained by applying parameters from the interpretation of laboratory tests of fine-grained soil material with linear and non-linear failure envelopes in the design of retaining walls with certain heights.
DOI: doi.org/10.55302/SJCE2514147s