Abstract
Evaluation of slope stability under rainfall is an important topic of Geotechnical Engineering. In order to study the influence of anisotropy ratio (kr = kx/ky) and anisotropy direction (α) on the seepage and stability of a slope, the SEEP/W and SLOPE/W modules in Geo-studio were utilized to carry out the numerical analysis of a homogeneous slope in Luogang District, Guangzhou City, China, which is based on the theory of unsaturated seepage and stability. Two kinds of soils (clay and sand) were included. Results show that: For sandy soil slope, the increase of kr promotes the rainfall infiltration, and the decrease of α prevents the rainfall infiltration. The maximum water content of the surface (MWCS) reaches maximum with the increase of kr and α. The rising height of groundwater (RHG) is −3–4 m and the safety factor (SF) is 1.3–1.7. For clayey soil slope, variations of kr and α have little impact on the seepage characteristics and slope stability. The MWCS remains almost the same. The rainfall infiltration depth (RID) is 0.5–1 m and the SF is about 1.7. Therefore, for sandy soil slope, it is not only necessary to consider the influence of kr, but also the influence of α. For clayey soil slope, it can be treated as isotropic material to simplify calculation.
Highlights
Slope stability is an important engineering problem in the geotechnical field, for example, the slope stability of the excavation of a foundation pit [1], the regulation of a riparian slope [2], and the stability of a high slope under complex geological environment in a reservoir area [3], etc
Under the annual average rainfall infiltration, the initial pore pressure of sand and clay was obviously different in that the initial pore pressure of sandy soil slope was slightly larger than clayey soil slope, but the distribution along the elevation was similar, which was reflected in that the initial pore water pressure firstly remained unchanged gradually increased along the elevation
The maximum negative pore-water pressure was close to −50 kPa, which was selected as the initial condition of all the calculation conditions in this paper
Summary
Slope stability is an important engineering problem in the geotechnical field, for example, the slope stability of the excavation of a foundation pit [1], the regulation of a riparian slope [2], and the stability of a high slope under complex geological environment in a reservoir area [3], etc. Slope failures mainly include external and internal causes. The external causes include rainfall [4,5,6], reservoir water level fluctuations [7,8,9], earthquakes [10,11,12], human activities such as excavation or blasting [1,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14,15], etc. The internal causes are mainly affected by the properties of the slope soil, which include soil types [16,17,18], unsaturated characteristics [19,20,21], soil strength [22,23,24], etc. The main consequence for slope instability caused by rainfall is reflected in these
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