Element Failure Risk Assessment of Soil Slope

Abstract

Two traditional methods when calculating slope failure risk (R) are the rigid body limit equilibrium (LEM) and finite-element methods (FEM). However, the LEM requires the previous assumption of the location and shape of the sliding surface; and the FEM needs to carry out postprocessing to estimate the slope sliding surfaces. This paper proposed an element failure risk method (EFR) to calculate R based on plastic limit analysis. The proposed method did not require any assumptions about the failure modes. The safety factors and velocity fields were first computed based on the stochastic programming model that used random soil shear strength parameters. The failure of the elements and R was evaluated and calculated. An efficient upper bound method (UBM) parallel computation was programmed based on Python, which enhanced computational efficiency. Two classic cases were conducted to validate the proposed method. The results showed that the proposed method could accurately calculate the probability and R. This broadened the applications of the EFR method in the risk assessment of slope stability.