Unified Formulation for Analysis of Slopes with General Slip Surface

The general availability of computers has provided efficient means of assessing the stability of slopes using several analytical methods. However, the increased use of computers coupled with a lack of unified presentation of the various methods sometimes leads to conflicting results. It is shown that the current analytical methods can be grouped into three categories based on the hypotheses used to describe the internal forces, namely: (1) The direction of the internal forces; (2) the height of the line of thrust; and (3) the shape of the distribution function of the internal shear forces. An analytical framework incorporating this idea is presented to facilitate and unify slope stability analysis with general slip surfaces. The study is a generalization of earlier work performed by Espinoza et al. for circular slip surfaces. The framework incorporates most current methods of analysis. The analytical model is implemented in a computer program. The program was used to study several case examples. On this basis, key issues associated with the influence of the internal shear forces on the factor of safety, for both circular and general slip failure surfaces, are discussed. It appears that for circular failure surfaces, even with heterogeneous soil stratigraphy the factor of safety is not affected by the choice of a particular hypothesis. On the contrary, for general slip surfaces this choice may significantly affect the results.