Prediction Method of Unsaturated Slope Stability Under Rainfall and Fluctuation of Reservoir Water Level

Abstract

As a sudden catastrophic geological disaster, landslides always cause a lot of casualties and property damage. Landslides in reservoir areas are not caused by a single factor, such as rainfall or fluctuation of reservoir water level, but the result of the combined actions. In order to accurately describe landslide mechanism and eventually be able to forecast a landslide accurately, it is necessary to select suitable constitutive model and rational parameters for numerical calculation of slope stability. In this paper, an unsaturated soil constitutive model was selected to describe the soil mechanical properties, in which the parameters of the model for the unsaturated soil S1 were obtained by element tests. With these parameters, numerical analyses were conducted to calculate the boundary value problem of slope model tests, in which the stability of model slope with the same soil S1 was tested under rainfall and fluctuation of reservoir water level. By comparing the test and calculation results, it was found that the numerical method proposed in this paper has satisfactory accuracy, being able to describe the mechanism of landslide and make a rational prediction of slope failure.