Reliability and failure mechanism of a slope with non-stationarity and rotated transverse anisotropy in undrained soil strength

Abstract

Natural soils often exhibit rotated transverse anisotropy due to various geological processes (e.g., tectonic movement, filling and soil deposition), and the trend of soil strength usually changes with depth. This study combines rotated transverse anisotropy with non-stationary random field (RF) to investigate the reliability and failure mechanism of a slope under undrained conditions. Two scenarios of non-stationary RF are considered: (a) the trend of soil strength increases along depth; (b) the trend increases along the direction perpendicular to bedding. It is found that the expected performance levels of slope reliability would be significantly different under different directions of the trend. When the undrained shear strength increases along the direction perpendicular to bedding, the changes of slope reliability and sliding consequence would be sensitive to the dip angle of strata. Besides, the failure mechanism can be affected by the direction of the trend and strata orientation. Generally, shallow failure is more likely to occur on the dip slope when soil strength increases along the direction perpendicular to bedding, while for reverse slope with soil strength increasing perpendicularly to the bedding, deep failure mechanism is significantly dominant.