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...

Probability-dependent failure modes of slopes and cuts in heterogeneous cohesive soils

Improbable slope failure is addressed in the framework of reliability analysis of slopes in heterogeneous cohesive soils, as the small subset of realisations that fail without additional measures to trigger failure. The mode of these slope failures, located at the weak tail of the reliability curve, is demonstrated to differ significantly...

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...