The calculation of passive pressure in two-dimensional soil failure

There are no rigorous solutions to earth pressure problems in soil mechanics and approximate answers to specific cases are normally obtained by rather tedious methods. Reece has proposed that the forces required to produce any kind of soil failure can be described by an additive equation. Advantage was taken of the simple nature of this equation to produce a family of curves from which it will be possible to obtain a ready solution to most two-dimensional passive pressure problems.