Exploration Of A Novel Plate Anchor Geometry With A View To Reducing Material Usage

Soil anchors are often used to stabilise structures. Various anchor designs have been developed with the aim of achieving higher pull-out capacity at lower cost. Examples include plate, helical, grouted and drilled shaft anchors. Presented herein is a series of experiments investigating the anchoring properties of root-like fractal shapes. The pull out resistance and resilience (pull-out resistance after an initial displacement) of a plate anchor with a root-like shape in a model granular soil comprising 50m glass beads is compared to that of a plain plate anchor. Results show that such root-like shapes are characterised by a higher pull-out resistance per unit volume of anchor material, and a higher resilience than plain shape anchors.

By focusing on a particular anchor shape in a model soil, this study pinpoints the potential benefit of using complex shape anchors. These results pave the way for further investigations of various anchors shapes, for instance fractal, wheel or mesh geometries, aiming at finding the shape that optimise the pull-out resistance and resilience.