Comparisons of seismic rock slope stability assessments between the Hoek-Brown and Mohr-Coulomb failure criteria

Current investigations have shown that earthquakes can trigger significant damages of equipment, property infrastructure and environment. This is a persistent cause of economic loss for any country, especially for the loss of life. The conventional method for slope stability design is to utilize limit equilibrium method (LEM) in conjunction with the pseudo-static (PS) approach. However, the LEM has a significant drawback which is to determine the slip surface before factor of safety calculation. The numerical upper and lower bound limit analysis method employed in this paper can avoid this limitation. In this study, the presented slope stability evaluations considering earthquake effects based on the finite difference method will be discussed and compared with the results from the numerical limit analysis methods.