A Reliability Analysis Method for the Earth–Rock Aggregate Slope

Abstract

A reliability analysis method is proposed to evaluate the stability state of the earth-rock aggregate slope which consists of rock blocks and soft soil. In order to describe the heterogeneity and discontinuity of the slope of this kind, uncertainty of the strength and spatial variation of the strength is considered. The reliability of an earth-rock aggregate slope can be obtained with the combination of the Monte Carlo method and Continuum-Discontinuum Element Method (CDEM). The relative displacement between monitoring points are used as the critical index for the failure criteria. An ideal and typical model for the earth-rock aggregate slope is established to demonstrate the analytical procedure of the reliability method. The results show that the reliability of a slope is greatly influenced by the distribution characteristics of the strength parameters. The reliability method based on probability statistics can obtain the correlation between the stability of a slope and the distribution property of the parameters, which provides more comprehensive results compared to the traditional deterministic methods. Keywords—earth-rock aggregate slope; heterogeneity; reliability; Monte Carlo method; CDEM