Abstract
The shear strength reduction method (SSRM) is a standard method in slope stability enabling to determine the factor of safety and related failure zones. In case of the non-associated Mohr-Coulomb model, the method can oscillate with respect to the refinement of a finite element mesh. To suppress this drawback, the non-associated model is approximated by the associated one such that the strength parameters are reduced by using a function depending on a scalar factor and on the effective friction and dilatancy angles. This modification (MSSRM) can be easily implemented in commercial codes like Plaxis or Comsol Multiphysics. Next, an optimization approach to the modified SSRM (OPT-MSSRM) is introduced. It is shown that the optimization problem is well-defined and can be analyzed by variational principles. For its solution, a regularization method is combined with mesh adaptivity and implemented in Matlab. The SSRM, MSSRM and OPT-MSSRM methods are compared on numerical examples representing a case study of a real heterogeneous slope.
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The authors acknowledge support for their work from the Czech Science Foundation (GAČR) through project No. 19-11441S.
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Sysala, S., Hrubešová, E., Michalec, Z., Tschuchnigg, F. (2023). A Rigorous Variant of the Shear Strength Reduction Method and Its Usage in Slope Stability. In: Barla, M., Di Donna, A., Sterpi, D., Insana, A. (eds) Challenges and Innovations in Geomechanics. IACMAG 2022. Lecture Notes in Civil Engineering, vol 288. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-12851-6_52
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-12851-6_52
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