Abstract
In practical engineering, slopes subjected to local loads, like footings of buildings, are common. This paper aims to give an insight into the effect of seismic force on the stability of locally loaded slopes. Numerical methods can be used to study this problem, but they require much computational time. Contrarily, limit analysis method is an approach to perform slope stability analysis with high computational efficiency. Thus, an accurate approach in mechanical points is proposed for this problem based on limit analysis method herein. In the framework of limit analysis, existing research about this problem used a kinematically translational velocity field. However, the velocity field of the locally loaded slope at failure is proved to be rotational possibly. Thus, to fill this gap, a 3D rotational velocity field is employed herein to obtain limit loads on the slope top, which improves the existing upper-bound solutions obtained by using the translational velocity field. The particle swarm optimization algorithm and the Nelder-Mead simplex algorithm are employed to search the global minimum of the upper-bound estimation of the limit load. Parametric analysis is performed and it shows that the limit load increases with the increase of a/H or the internal friction angle φ but decreases as the slope angle β or the length-to-width ratio (L/t) of the local load increases. Furthermore, the limit load is found to decrease with the increase of the seismic coefficient and it is proportional to the seismic coefficient.
Introduction
It is common to construct infrastructures, such as a building or a road, on the top of slopes in engineering practice. In this circumstance, they are prone to collapse when the stability of the slope is threatened. In some regions of the world, there are frequent seismic activities that have great adverse effects on slope stability. When an earthquake occurs, the buildings on the top surface of slopes are likely to collapse, resulting in huge losses (; ; ; ). Thus, it is important to study the effect of seismic activities on the stability of locally loaded slopes.
Many papers have been devoted to the stability analysis of locally loaded slopes using various approaches. The slice method of limit equilibrium was used to study this problem by many scholars (; ; ; ; ). Using the limit equilibrium method, conducted circular arc limit equilibrium analysis and gave a set of charts for clay slopes bearing strip and square footings. The limit equilibrium method was also employed to provide solutions and design charts for this problem by many other scholars (; ). Recently, the finite element method has been widely adopted. employed the finite element method to investigate the undrained bearing capacity of strip footings on the top surface of slopes. The finite element method combined with a linear programming was used to compute the rigorous upper bounds of the collapse load by . used the discontinuity layout optimization (DLO) approach to investigate the bearing capacity of a footing on the crest of a c-φ slope. The DLO approach was also employed by to study the bearing capacity and failure mechanism of locally loaded slopes.
However, the limit equilibrium method requires hypotheses about the inter-slice force, which may reduce the theoretical rigor, and the numerical method requires much computational time, which is of low efficiency. Compared with the methods introduced above, limit analysis method is equipped with a rigorous mechanics basis and high calculation efficiency. Therefore, it is studied by many scholars in recent years. The upper bound theorem of limit analysis states that an upper bound estimation of the force which drives the slope to collapse can be obtained by equating the total external work rate to the internal energy dissipation rate computed in a kinematically admissible velocity field (; ; ; ; ). There are many kinematically admissible 3D velocity fields that can be used in the upper bound analysis of slope stability, for instance, the cylindrical and spherical mechanism (), the 3D multi-blocks failure mechanism (), and the 3D rotational failure mechanism (; ). Besides these mechanisms above, the mechanical mechanism at failure of granular materials, like soils, can also be derived from the view of the soil particle rearrangement (; ). For example, based on the soil particle rearrangement, proposed a new coupled thermo-hydro-mechanical mechanism. performed a 3D stability analysis of locally loaded slopes and provided a set of upper-bound solution using the 3D translational multi-blocks failure mechanism. However, this issue has never been studied using a 3D rotational failure mechanism since this scenario may concern a rotational velocity field of slope at failure. Nevertheless, the recent numerical investigation performed by showed that, at failure, the velocity field of the locally loaded slope is rotational rather than translational, and the velocity field given by is reprinted in Figure 1. Therefore, it is necessary to perform a 3D seismic stability analysis of locally loaded slopes based on a 3D rotational velocity field, which is the gap of the present research. In the framework of limit analysis, the widely used 3D rotational velocity field is the 3D rotational failure mechanism proposed by . Thus, the 3D rotational failure mechanism is employed herein to perform a stability analysis of slopes subjected to local loads on the top surface.
FIGURE 1
In the presented work, the 3D stability of slopes, subjected to seismic forces and local loads on the top surface, is investigated. The upper bound theorem of limit analysis is employed to calculate the critical limit load using the 3D rotational failure mechanism. To obtain the global minimum, the particle swarm optimization algorithm in combination with the Nelder-Mead simplex algorithm is adopted in searching for the least upper-bound solution. This paper extends the work of stability analysis of slopes subjected to local loads based on the 3D translational failure mechanism by
Problem description
As shown in Figure 2, a slope subjected to vertical local loads on the top surface is considered. The angle of the slope is denoted by and the height by H. The soil in the slope body is regarded as a homogeneous and isotropic material, obeying the Mohr-Coulomb yield criterion. The cohesion and internal friction angle of the soil are denoted by c and , respectively. The vertical local load, a cause of slope failure, is uniformly distributed on the top of the slope. The width and the length of the locally loading region are denoted by t and L, respectively, and the distance between the local load and the crest of the slope is represented by a. To study the seismic stability of the slope, earthquake forces are considered in this paper and they are described by a seismic coefficient . The upper bound theorem of limit analysis is employed to calculate the upper bound of the limit load causing slope collapse. This issue was already studied by
FIGURE 2

The 3D slope with a local load on the top surface.
In this problem, with the increase of a/t, the failure pattern will change from toe failure and face failure to Prandtl-type failure in which the failure surface extends to the bottom surface of slopes. The Prandtl-type failure cannot be studied by the 3D rotational failure mechanism. Therefore, only the toe failure and the face failure are in the consideration of this work, which is the limitation of the proposed method.
Upper bound seismic stability analysis of locally loaded slopes
Description of 3D rotational failure mechanism
The 3D rotational failure mechanism was firstly proposed by
FIGURE 3

3D rotational failure mechanism of slopes.
For the sake of the consistency with engineering practice, the 3D rotational failure mechanism is modified by splitting the halves of the 3D sliding body and placing a plane-strain insert between these two-halves, as shown in Figure 4. The width of the plane insert is denoted by b. It should be noted that the sum of the width of the two curved halves and the width of the plane insert, b, cannot exceed the slope width B. In addition, the width of the plane insert b is optimized together with the geometrical parameters determining the rotation center in the search for the best failure surface. In Figure 4, the local load q is symmetric about the symmetry plane of the failure mechanism. It should be noticed that the minimum width of the failure mechanism at the top surface of the slope, i.e., b, should not be smaller than the length of the local load, i.e., L, and, in other words, the constraint condition of should be enforced in the search of the optimal failure surface. The external work rate and internal energy dissipation rate of the two curved halves are calculated by complicated integrals, while those of the plane insert can be obtained by the product of b and those of the 2D situation.
FIGURE 4

The modified 3D rotational failure mechanism with a plane insert.
Calculations of external work rate
To perform work rate calculations of external forces, a local coordinate system x-o-y is set up in the circular cross-section, as shown in Figure 3 and the original point o is the center of the circular cross-section. In this paper, the considered external forces include the gravity force, the seismic force and the vertical local load q on the top surface.
The work rate of gravity force includes two parts. The first one is the gravity force work rate done by the plane insert of the 3D rotational failure mechanism and the other one is that done by the two curved halves at the two ends of the failure mechanism. By integration, the expression of the gravity force work rate for the two curved halves is (
Angle is found from the geometrical relations
After the integration about and which is calculated analytically, and about that is performed numerically, Eq. 5 is converted to
The local load on the top of the slope is regarded as surface force whose work rate is obtained by performing integral over the intersecting region of the top of failure mechanism and the area where the load is distributed. For instance, when the failure mechanism gets through the right end point of the local load, as shown in Figure 3, the expression of the work rate of the local load is
The angle , the integral upper limit in the expression of , is found from the geometrical relationswhere is equal to , thus is involved in the expression of . The expression of is given in the Appendix A.
In this paper, the seismic force is regarded as a static inertia force and characterized by a coefficient , which is in the range of 0 and 0.2. Similar to the calculation of gravity force work rate, the seismic force work rate is also divided into two parts. The seismic force work rate for the two curved halves is,
After performing integration about and analytically, then Eq. 14 can be written as,where the expressions for ) is reported in the Appendix A of this paper.
The seismic force work rate of the plane insert can be expressed as,where the expressions for is reported in the Appendix A of this paper.
Thus the total external work rate can be expressed as.
Calculations of internal energy dissipation rate
The calculations of internal energy dissipation rate can be converted to integrals over the face of the slope and the top surface of the slope, which are denoted by and respectively. The expressions of the internal energy dissipation rate of the two curved halves is
Summing and leads to the internal energy dissipation rate of the two curved halves, i.e.
By substituting Eqs 15, 16 into Eq. 17, then Eq. 17 can be written as
Similarly, the internal energy dissipation rate of the plane insert can be derived as follows,
Similarly, summing and leads to the internal energy dissipation rate of the plane insert, i.e
By substituting Eqs 19, 20 into Eq. 21, then Eq. 21 can be written as
Therefore, the total internal energy dissipation rate of the 3D failure mechanism can be obtained by summing those of the rotational mechanism and the plane insert, i.e.,
For the sake of completeness, the expressions of and are given in the Appendix A of this paper.
Optimization of the limit load q
According to the upper bound theorem of limit analysis, equating the internal energy dissipation rate to the external work rate results in the upper bound estimation of the limit load. And its expression is as follows,
It is easily found that the upper bound of the local load in this study is a function of five parameters: . Each set of these parameters defines a kinematically admissible velocity field that is able to yield an upper bound estimation of the limit load. Thus the critical limit load can be obtained by cycling these parameters under the following constraint conditions until the least upper bound solution is obtained.where is the maximum width of rotation mechanism and B is the slope width. To find the global minimum of the limit load, the particle swarm optimization algorithm is firstly used to locate the region near the optimum point, followed by adopting Nelder-Mead simplex algorithm to search the global minimum using the solution from the particle swarm algorithm as the initial point. The obtained minimum upper bound solution is seen as the limit load and used to perform the following analysis.
Results and discussions
Comparisons
To validate the correctness of the proposed approach, the limit loads of 10 cases computed from the proposed approach are compared with the solutions of
TABLE 1
| Case | a/t | /c | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Present solutions | Michalowski ( | |||||
| 1 | 20 | 45 | 0.25 | 1.6 | 24.24 | 25.08 |
| 2 | 20 | 60 | 0.25 | 2.5 | 27.47 | 28.40 |
| 3 | 10 | 30 | 0.25 | 1.4 | 12.78 | 12.79 |
| 4 | 10 | 45 | 0.25 | 1.8 | 12.70 | 12.80 |
| 5 | 10 | 60 | 0.25 | 2.0 | 11.91 | 12.81 |
| 6 | 20 | 45 | 1.25 | 1.4 | 24.99 | 26.19 |
| 7 | 20 | 60 | 1.25 | 1.8 | 22.57 | 23.55 |
| 8 | 10 | 30 | 1.25 | 1.2 | 12.58 | 13.21 |
| 9 | 10 | 45 | 1.25 | 1.6 | 13.05 | 13.53 |
| 10 | 10 | 60 | 1.25 | 1.8 | 12.15 | 12.99 |
Comparison between the proposed method and
TABLE 2
| Case | a/t | |||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Present solutions | ||||||
| 1 | 20 | 30 | 2.0 | 0.8 | 23.41 | 23.89 |
| 2 | 20 | 30 | 1.0 | 0.8 | 11.80 | 12.44 |
| 3 | 20 | 30 | 0.5 | 0.9 | 6.54 | 6.99 |
| 4 | 20 | 40 | 2.0 | 1.6 | 23.13 | 23.75 |
| 5 | 20 | 40 | 1.0 | 1.7 | 12.11 | 12.70 |
| 6 | 20 | 40 | 0.5 | 1.5 | 5.22 | 5.31 |
| 7 | 10 | 30 | 2.0 | 2.5 | 16.30 | 17.72 |
| 8 | 10 | 30 | 1.0 | 2.6 | 8.82 | 9.44 |
| 9 | 10 | 40 | 2.0 | 2.8 | 16.89 | 17.71 |
| 10 | 10 | 40 | 1.0 | 2.5 | 7.08 | 7.64 |
Comparison between the proposed method and
Parametric analysis
Several design charts are presented in Figure 5 to perform parametric analysis, each showing the limit load ratio ( is the limit load leading to slope failure and c is the cohesion of soil masses) as a function of a/H. In the calculation, the B/H ratio is set as three and the vertical load is distributed in a rectangular area (L/t=2). The soil cohesion is set to 20Â kPa and the internal friction angle is set as 10 or 20 . The unit weight of the soil mass is equal to 20Â kN/m3. Figure 5 indicates that the limit load ratio increases with the increase of a/H or the internal friction angle but decreases as the slope angle increases. It can be found by comparing Figures 5A,B that the growth rate of the limit load ratio with the increase of a/H is larger for =20 than =10 . For example, limit load ratio increases by 2.64 (from 2.96 for a/H=0.2 to 5.6 for a/H=0.4) for =10 and =30 , but the growth is equal to 11.26 (from 13.38 to 24.63) for =20 .
FIGURE 5

Limit load ratio as a function of a/H.(A) =0.1, =10 (B) =0.1, =20 (C) =0.2, =10 (D) =0.2, =20 .
Figure 6 is presented to study the effect of the seismic force on the limit load. The limit load ratio is plotted as a function of the seismic coefficient in Figure 6. It can be found from Figure 6 that the limit load decreases with the increase of seismic coefficient , which is because the seismic force is an adverse effect on the slope stability and can reduce the bearing capacity of slopes. Another interesting fact is that the curves in Figure 6 are almost straight lines, indicating that the limit load is proportional to the seismic coefficient . Therefore, given some limit loads for some seismic coefficients, unknown limit loads for certain seismic coefficients can be obtained by linear interpolation.
FIGURE 6

Limit load ratio as a function of seismic coefficient .
Figure 7 is given for investigating the effect of the shape of the local load on the magnitude of the limit load. In Figure 7, the dimensionless limit load ratio () is shown as a function of the length-to-width ratio (L/t) of the local load. It can be seen from Figure 7 that the limit load decreases and gradually becomes stable with the increase of the L/t ratio. In the calculation, a/H and are set to 0.2 and 0.1 respectively, and is equal to 10 . The length of the local load L is less than the slope width B in the calculation.
FIGURE 7

The influence of the length of the local load on the magnitude of the limit load; , a/b=0.3, .
Conclusion
In light of the kinematical approach of limit analysis, this paper investigates the effect of seismic force on slope bearing capacity by calculating the limit load on the top surface of slopes. In the framework of limit analysis, the stability analysis of locally loaded slopes was performed based on the translational velocity field. However, numerical research shows that the failure velocity field seems rotational. Therefore, to fill this gap, the 3D rotational failure mechanism is employed as the kinematically admissible velocity field to investigate this problem. For validation, the limit loads computed from the proposed approach are compared with the solutions available in the literature. Parametric analyses are presented to investigate the influence of different parameters on the critical loads. Based on the work above, the conclusions are drawn:
(1) Comparisons with the results of using the 3D multi-block failure mechanism and with the DLO approach show a good agreement, indicating the correctness of the proposed approach. The upper bound of limit loads computed from the proposed method is found lower than those computed using the 3D multi-blocks failure mechanism, indicating that the 3D rotational failure mechanism can improve the upper-bound estimation of the limit load from the 3D multi-block failure mechanism.
(2) The limit load is found to decrease with the increase of the seismic coefficient and it is proportional to the seismic coefficient. Thus, unknown limit loads for certain seismic coefficients can be obtained by the linear interpolation method.
(3) Parametric analysis indicates that the limit load increases with the increase of a/H or the internal friction angle but decreases as the slope angle increases. And, with the increase of a/H, the growth rate of the limit load becomes larger for the larger value of . The investigation into the effect of the shape of the local load on the limit load shows that the limit load decreases and gradually becomes stable as the length-to-width ratio (L/t) of the local load increases.
(4) The sliding surface extending to the bottom surface of the slope is not considered in this work, which is the limitation of this paper. Follow-up investigations can improve this limitation.
Statements
Data availability statement
The original contributions presented in the study are included in the article/supplementary material, further inquiries can be directed to the corresponding authors.
Author contributions
XJ: writing original draft preparation, validation, and formal analysis. QW: conceptualization and methodology, supervision.
Funding
This research was funded by the Key Programs of Zhejiang College of Security Technology, grant number: No. AF 2021Z01.
Conflict of interest
The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.
Publisher’s note
All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article, or claim that may be made by its manufacturer, is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.
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Appendix A
Summary
Keywords
three-dimensional slope stability, seismic force, limit analysis, local loads, 3D rotational velocity field
Citation
Ji X and Wu Q (2023) Three-dimensional seismic stability of locally loaded slopes under a rotational velocity field. Front. Earth Sci. 10:1039398. doi: 10.3389/feart.2022.1039398
Received
08 September 2022
Accepted
31 October 2022
Published
17 January 2023
Volume
10 - 2022
Edited by
Huaming An, Kunming University of Science and Technology, China
Reviewed by
Bing Bai, Beijing Jiaotong University, China
Kaizong Xia, Institute of Rock and Soil Mechanics (CAS), China
Danqing Song, Tsinghua University, China
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*Correspondence: Qingling Wu, wzpwuql@126.com
This article was submitted to Geohazards and Georisks, a section of the journal Frontiers in Earth Science
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All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.