Stability of Highly Overconsolidated Soil Slopes

Despite the advances in both understanding and modelling of the behaviour of unsaturated soils, numerical analyses considering partial saturation are rare in engineering practice. The purpose of the current paper is to compare the factors of safety against slope failure obtained from different types of analyses (unsaturated and effective stress analyses), using the finite element method, and to investigate the degree of inaccuracy introduced when partial saturation is neglected. The results of the numerical analyses demonstrate that, although similar factors of safety are calculated for steady-state conditions, significant disparity is exhibited in the short-term.