The theory of a rigid circular disc ground anchor buried in an elastic soil either with adhesion or without adhesion

This paper presents a classical elastostatic analysis of the following situation. A rigid circular disc of radius a is buried in an elastic soil at a depth h below a stress-free surface. The disc is subject to a normal force T resulting in uniform normal displacement of the disc of amount α. Two problems are solved. In the first, the elastic soil is assumed to adhere to the underside of the disc and a solution is obtained by perturbation methods for $\text{a}\text{h}\text{< 0·97}$. For the second, the material on the underside of the disc is assumed to have broken away; here, an exact solution is found for the limiting case $\text{a}\text{h}\text{→ 0}$. The analysis is pertinent to the recently innovated civil engineering technique which utilizes ground anchors to support the retaining walls of excavations.