On characteristic values for calculating factors of safety for dyke stability

Various simplified approaches are used to calculate the characteristic values of shear strength properties, which have then been used in deterministic stability analyses of a dyke cross-section. The calculated factors of safety are compared with the 5-percentile ‘system response’ of the dyke cross-section, calculated using the more exhaustive...

Probabilistic analysis of seepage for internal stability of earth embankments

Internal erosion, or piping, has been attributed as a major cause of dam and embankment failures. Most prediction models for predicting piping use the hydraulic gradient between the upstream and downstream water levels as an indicator. No explicit consideration is made regarding preferential pathways, although piping usually initiates from a...

Slope failure analysis using the random material point method

The random material point method (RMPM), which combines random field theory and the material point method (MPM), is proposed. It differs from the random finite-element method (RFEM), by assigning random field (cell) values to material points that are free to move relative to the computational grid rather than to Gauss points in a conventional...

Investigation of the reduction in uncertainty due to soil variability when conditioning a random field using Kriging

Spatial variability of soil properties is inherent in soil deposits, whether as a result of natural geological processes or engineering construction. It is therefore important to account for soil variability in geotechnical design in order to represent more realistically a soil’s in situ state. This variability may be modelled as a random field,...