Lateral Earth Pressure Calculation by Classical Methods

Two classic methods for calculating lateral earth pressure are Rankine and Coulomb methods.

Soil mostly fails when the internal stress reaches its shear strength. It can be assumed for granular and friction soils that the failure plane is a straight line (Fig. 1). For classic methods like Rankind and Coulomb, this assumption can be applied to cohesive soils as well with including cohesion in the calculation.