Slope Stability and Reliability Analysis (Mechanical Engineering Theory and Applications)

Slope stability is always a very important topic in many developed and highly congested cities, particularly for many cities in China where slope failures have killed many people with significant loss of properties. The author has also participated in different types of slope stability research and consultancy works in different countries, and has published two books entitled "Soil Slope stability analysis and stabilization – new methods and insights" and "Frontier in civil engineering, vol.1, Stability analysis of geotechnical structures" which are well favoured by many students, engineers and researchers. The author also frequently receives email about the details of the more innovative slope stability analysis methods, stabilization and monitoring system, as well as the procedures in the numerical implementation of some of the stability analysis methods. In views of the various improvements in the theory of slope stability analysis over the years, the author would like to write a new book on slope stability analysis and slope reliability analysis, and the new materials will be useful to both students, engineers as well as researchers. In this book, different methods of slope stability analysis will be discussed in a broad sense. Following that, the limit equilibrium and finite element methods will be discussed in more details, as these two methods are the methods commonly used for practical works. Detailed procedures for limit equilibrium analysis will be provided to aid the students in learning, while the program SLOPE2000 will be introduced for the solution of more complicated problems. Some interesting engineering cases will be illustrated in this book. The author will also try to introduce the use of distinct element slope stability method, which is a technique still far from practical applications, but it does offer some insights which are not possible with the other methods. Following that, the author will introduce the importance of reliability slope stability analysis, which is an important issue for cities with complicated ground conditions and high water table. Due to the intensive computation required for reliability analysis, the author has proposed many improvements to various reliability assessment methods in order to maintain a balance between accuracy and time of computation. The central core of SLOPE 2000 and SLOPE 3D for two-dimensional and three-dimensional slope stability analysis as introduced in this book are developed mainly by the author, while there are many research personnel who have helped in various works associated with the research works. The authors would like to thank Yip C.J., Wei W.B., Li N., Li L. Li D.Z. and Liu L.L. for the helps in preparing parts of the works and the preparation of some of the figures in this book.