Seismic Slope Stability with Discretization-Based Kinematic Analysis

This paper presents a novel procedure, discretization-based kinematic analysis, to investigate the seismic slope stability at limit state. Such a procedure combines the merits of highly efficient kinematic analysis with adaptive discretization technique for generation of kinematically-admissible failure mechanism for non-uniform soil slopes with varying soil strength parameters, which cannot be readily solved using conventional limit analysis. The proposed approach is applied to a non-uniform soil slope to demonstrate the adaptability of the procedure for wider applications. The upper bound formulations of yield seismic acceleration and/or limit surcharge are derived based on the balance of work rate. Through an optimization procedure, the least upper bound solutions are sought under given parameters, and the critical failure mechanism can be characterized simultaneously.