Sadly, many universities are being forced to limit the number of credit hours for undergraduate engineering degrees. This means that, among other bad decisions, they are making courses like Soils I electives, and not requirements for Civil Engineering students.
Good thread. Disagree that neglecting passive resistance leads to "UNCONSERVATIVE" design as stated by the original poster. If anything, the opposite is true.
And, as others have pointed out, it takes substantially greater soil strains to mobilize full passive as compared to full active...
"Drained" and "Undrained" do not refer to whether the soil voids contain water. Rather, "drained" refers to a soil state whereby all excess pore pressure has dissipated (generally, long-term conditions). "Undrained" refers to a soil state where excess pore pressure exists (generally...
Never a good idea to rely on neighboring property soils reports for your property. Yours could be the site where all of the trash was buried! Hire a competent Geotechnical Engineer early in the project, and you will save yourself many headaches later.
Due to the multitude of methods available to estimate unit skin friction, you are probably better off just asked the Geotechs that published the reports what methods they used.
