slope failure

factor safety

slope reliability

slip surface

sliding block

failure criterion

rock pillar

Computers and Geotechnics

The strength reduction method (SRM) combining with the Generalized Hoek-Brown (GHB) criterion has become a widely used means to assess the stability of rock slopes. Therefore, various efforts have been made to establish a standard reduction strategy for strength parameters. This paper presents a new nonlinear SRM based on the GHB criterion, and the core novelty of the proposed method is to provide a reduction strategy with precise physical meaning to find an optimal set of parameters that trigger rock slope failure. To verify the validity of the proposed method, two illustrative examples are analyzed. The results show that the proposed method could lead to a reasonable safety factor, and the critical sliding surface obtained by the proposed method can reflect the tensile crack in the steep slope. Finally, to distinguish the computational results and efficiency among the proposed method and other preexisting reduction methods, other more 8 slopes selected from the literature are used for research objects. The results show that the safety factors resulted from the proposed method are very close to those acquired by the most accurate method available at present (Hammah’s method), however, its computational efficiency is comparatively higher than that of Hammah’s method.

A strength reduction method based on the Generalized Hoek-Brown (GHB) criterion for rock slope stability analysis