In The Netherlands, an extensive design procedure for sheet piling walls has been developed. Besides the partial safety factor concept of the Eurocode 7, the Dutch National Annex offers a clear step-by-step design process, checking against failure, verifying stability and allowing optimization of the design. Since its initial development in the eighties, many improvements have been made to suit the needs of geotechnical designers and consultants.

D-Sheet Piling is a tool used to design retaining walls and horizontally loaded piles. D-Sheet Piling ’s graphical interactive interface requires just a short training period, allowing the user to focus their skills directly on the input of sound geotechnical data and the subsequent design of the wall or single pile.

Besides features generally found in other retaining wall design software, D-Sheet Piling offers several specific design features:

Automatic interpretation of CPT´s: All geotechnical parameters needed for input are interpretated from CPT data.

Length optimization: The critical length for the retaining structure is checked automatically by reducing the length of the wall step-by-step, until instability or unacceptable displacement occurs.

Safety: D-Sheet Piling verifies the safety of the sheet piling wall for selected construction stages by applying partial safety factors defined according to the Eurocode 7, including Eurocode annexes for The Netherlands and Belgium. The user can also define their own partial safety factors.

Anchor wall stability: The stability of the anchor wall is checked according to the Kranz theory.

Overall stability:A Bishop slip-circle analysis is used to check the overall stability of the wall and soil.

Feasibility comparison: Projects can be compared to experiences of real projects and guidelines to help to ascertain if installation/vibration of a sheet piling wall of this type is feasible.

This article comes from deltares edit released