PREDICTING THE UPLIFT CAPACITY OF VERTICALLY LOCATED TWO-PLATE ANCHORS

Soil anchors are generally used for structures that are subjected to pullout forces, such as offshore floating bodies, transmission towers, structures requiring lateral resistance or submerged platforms etc. Multi-plate anchors are used as a foundation that apply either large compression or tension forces using a number of plates welded along a central shaft. These anchors that have more than one plate have a complex interaction between the adjacent plates due to over applying stress zones. Therefore, this interaction affects the failure mechanism and the uplift capacity of the system. However, no thorough numerical analyses have been performed to determine the ultimate pullout loads of multi-plate anchors. By far the majority of the research has been directed towards the tensile uplift behavior of one-plate single anchor. Estimating the uplift capacity by using a practical design method that is obtained from a numerical analysis of two-plate anchors in sand is described in this paper. This method can be used more confidently by design engineers to estimate the pullout capacity of two-plate anchors under tension loading. The theoretical results are compared with the numerical data and acceptable values are obtained.