A soft layer to control soil arching above a buried structure

The load on a buried structure's flat roof, under static conditions, is influenced by a soil-structure interaction phenomenon, known as arching. The possibility of controlling this mechanism by application of a soft layer in the soil above the roof is investigated and described herein. New definitions, that better describe various aspects of the phenomenon, are proposed, and used in a quantitative analysis of the problem. The effects of the soft layer are discussed and it is shown that there is an optimal length of the soft layer that yields minimal loading on the buried roof.