CALCULATION OF THE ULTIMATE BEARING CAPACITY OF SOIL SLOPE BASED ON THE UNIFIED STRENGTH THEORY

Abstract

At present, the failure criteria used in calculating the ultimate bearing capacity of soil slope are the Tresca and Mohr-Coulomb criteria. But the results are conservative and the potential strength of soil mass cannot be utilized sufficiently because these two criteria do not take into account the effect of the intermediate principal stress. In this paper the unified strength theory was used to analyze the ultimate bearing capacity of soil slope. The formula for calculating the ultimate bearing capacity of soil slope using the unified strength theory was established. At the end, a case history was analyzed and it indicated that the result of the unified strength theory is larger than that of the Mohr-Coulomb criterion. This indicates that calculation of ultimate bearing capacity of soil slope with the unified strength theory can sufficiently exploit the strength of material. Therefore, the calculation of ultimate bearing capacity of the soil slope based on the unified strength theory will be of great significance in future applications.