A global procedure for evaluating stability of three-dimensional slopes

In the setting of the three-dimensional limit equilibrium method, a procedure for bounding the factor of safety is proposed under the constraint of the reasonable conditions on the system of forces suggested by Morgenstern and Price. No assumption is made regarding the internal forces but the system of forces resulted from the procedure satisfies the reasonable conditions as well as all the equilibrium conditions. The optimization problem proposed has weak nonlinearity but no numerical problems inherent in the methods of columns and can be solved using those conventional optimization techniques. Through some typical examples, it is illustrated that even for complicated failure surfaces the proposed procedure gives rise to a very narrow interval of the factor of safety with a low degree of computational complexity. Copyright Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2012