Non-intrusive reliability analysis of unsaturated embankment slopes accounting for spatial variabilities of soil hydraulic and shear strength parameters

Abstract

Existing reliability analyses of embankment slopes usually considered the spatial variabilities of shear strength parameters and saturated hydraulic conductivity separately. Additionally, the variability in the soil–water characteristic curve (SWCC) was ignored. A non-intrusive approach is proposed for reliability analyses of unsaturated embankment slopes under four different cases on a steady-state seepage analysis. The spatial variabilities of hydraulic parameters (including fitting parameters, a and n, of SWCC and saturated hydraulic conductivity) and shear strength parameters are accounted for simultaneously. To illustrate the proposed approach, a hypothetical embankment under unsaturated seepage is investigated. The soil parameters of the embankment and foundation are modeled as lognormal random fields and lognormal random variables, respectively, to take into account the inherent uncertainties. Parametric sensitivity studies are then performed to account explicitly for the influence of the spatial variation of hydraulic parameters on the reliability of embankment slope stability. The proposed approach can act as a practical and rigorous tool for estimating the reliability of embankment slopes with small levels of probability of failure (i.e., 10−4–10−3). An interesting finding that the probability of failure of the unsaturated embankment slope decreases with the variability of the fitting parameter n of SWCC is observed and explained.