Technical-Economical Comparison of Embedded Retaining Walls

Since the urbanization has raised the cost of land, it is necessary to go deeper into the ground and also towering vertically towards the sky. A deep excavation into the ground is fundamental for creating additional floor space to meet increasing space requirements for parking in multi-story buildings. Numbers of deep excavation city centers are increasing every year. Structures in the immediate vicinity of excavations and dense traffic scenario, have made excavations a difficult task to execute. In this context, analysis and design of proper deep excavations and their supporting systems are essential. Even in complicated urban settings, deep retaining systems have been successfully applied by overcoming construction challenges. Nowadays Tirana, capital of Albania is lacking space for new residential buildings .So it is necessary to make interventions in soils for its stability in vertical cut in order to minimize risks in the structures nearby. The embedded retaining walls are presents as one of the best solutions. Embedded retaining walls are walls that penetrate into the ground and rely to a significant extent or even completely on the passive resistance of the ground for their support. Also ground anchors are used as a support for high depths. The embedded retaining walls taken in this study will be: pile walls, diaphragm walls and sheet pile walls. We will design these walls for different excavation depths. Finally for each kind of retaining wall we will define the cost of materials, the cost of construction, and their displacements. Based on these conditions we will compare these retaining walls in order to define which wall is a better solution, based on technical-economical features, for each excavation depth that we have taken in the process of design.