Stability Analysis of Soil Slope Using Discontinuity Layout Optimization

Abstract

Many efforts have been focused on stability problems of geotechnical structures with the limit analysis method. A key advance of this present method is that the problem is described only in terms of nodes and discontinuities connecting those nodes rather than element or bodies. The alternative approximation procedure might involve discretization of a given body using a suitably large number of nodes laid out on a grid, with the failure mechanism comprising the most critical subset of potential discontinuities interconnecting these nodes. The method using Mohr-Coulomb failure criterion to formulate the objective function is developed and the safety factor is determined from optimization. In order to evaluate the applicability and validity of the proposed method numerical results of some examples are presented and compared with the solutions obtained using other well-known techniques. The comparisons show that the proposed method is an effective method and can be applied to evaluate the safety factor in the analyses of slope stability problems.