Have you ever admired a Nashville TN Retaining Walls in a garden or near a highway and wondered, "Just how does that work?" Short walls slope backwards but very tall walls are perfectly perpendicular to the ground. It can make a person very curious!
There are basically three common types of Nashville TN Retaining Walls: gravity wall, cantilever, and sheet piling. The gravity wall is very common in landscaping and is designed for short heights. Basically, the wall works by holding back the earth behind it by sheer mass. The wall simply uses its own weight to hold back the earth as the earth being held back lacks sufficient force to move the wall. Gravity walls need to be built in a roughly pyramid shape meaning that they get thicker closer to their base. The thickness formula states that the wall's base needs to be one half to three fourths its height. As a result, only short walls are practical and economical to build by this method. Building a 40' foot wall would require a base thickness of 30'! Certainly, this is excessive when there are wall types that can be implemented with much less building material needed.
Such a wall is the cantilever wall as its the same thickness along its entire height. To hold it stationary, a footing or plate that runs perpendicular to the wall face is attached at the bottom of the wall and extends back into the earth being retained. It makes the wall look like an upside "L". Once the earth is piled behind the wall, it will rest on top of the footer. This weight from this soil pushes down on the footer and basically keeps the Nashville TN Retaining Walls from tipping over. Of course, the wall itself must be very strong as well since the cantilever footing is only part of the equation. Retaining Wall Construction in nashville
The third type of wall, sheet piling, is often seen around construction sites. You might have a seen large crane using a hammer device to pound sheets of steel into the ground to help in the construction of overpasses or highways. This is another brute force approach to retaining earth. With a sheet piling wall, steel, wood or other materials are driven into the earth up to two-thirds their length. The remaining exposed one-third is the part of the material the earth is pushing against once the wall is completed. Basically, the wall is anchored so deeply in the earth that the soil pushing against it can't move it. If the wall is of sufficient height, tie backs are needed to keep the wall from bulging and potentially failing.
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