APPLICATION OF STRENGTH REDUCTION FINITE ELEMENT METHOD TO SLOPE STABILITY ASSESSMENT AT BEIMENGOU SITE

The stability assessment of Beimengou slope is achieved on the basis of the safety factor calculated by the strength reduction FEM.Through the reduction of values,the FEM computation will not converge when the model reaches instability state,and the safety factor is just the reduction coefficient at this state.According to the calculation,the failure mode and failure propagation tendency of the slope can be obtained,which helps to understand the failure mechanism of the slope.The calculation results show that the safety factor calculated by the strength reduction FEM is fairly close to the that calculated by the traditional limit equilibrium method.Therefore,strength reduction FEM provides a new way to evaluate slope stability.