Studies on model caissons embedded in marine clay for coastal protection wall

Caissons can be used as embedded walls in marine environment for protecting the coast from severe erosion caused by waves and currents. The design of these embedded caissons requires proper evaluation of lateral passive earth pressures, base pressures and deflections. In this paper, an attempt has been made to arrive at ground level deflections, base pressures and tilts of model caissons under lateral static and cyclic loading and some interesting conclusions are brought out. The mobilization rate of ground level deflection is slow in the initial period up to a deflection of 10% of diameter of caisson. The ultimate base pressure is partly controlled by liquidity index. For a given load cycles, tilt in a caisson is observed to be more at higher values of CLR (CLR is defined as the ratio of applied cyclic load to the ultimate static lateral load). Also, based on the observations, an equation was suggested between ground level deflection and tilt.