Stability analysis of heterogeneous infinite slopes under rainfall-infiltration by means of an improved Green–Ampt model

Abstract

Rainfall infiltration analysis has a great significance to the mitigation and risk assessment of rainfall-induced landslides. The original Green–Ampt (GA) model ignored the fact that a transitional layer exists in infiltration regions of soils under the rainfall permeation; moreover, it cannot effectively analyze the rainfall-infiltrated heterogeneous slope considering the spatial variability of saturated hydraulic conductivity ( ks ). In this study, an improved GA model is proposed for the rainfall-infiltration analysis of heterogeneous slopes. Four common slope cases are investigated to validate the effectiveness of the proposed model. An infinite slope model is taken as an illustrative example to investigate the distributions of volumetric water content and slope stability under the rainfall infiltration. The results show that the distributions of volumetric water content and factor of safety ( Fs) obtained from the proposed model are in very good agreement with the numerical results of the Richards' equation. In contrast, the modified GA model obtains biased distributions of volumetric water content and smaller Fs for the same cases. The results show that the proposed GA model can accurately identify the location of critical slip surface of the slope, and as such it provides an efficient method for risk analysis and control of slopes susceptible to landslide.