Long embankment failure accounting for longitudinal spatial variation – A probabilistic study

For long earth embankments or levees, it is of interest to investigate the slope failure mode in the longitudinal direction. However, this is less commonly discussed in comparison to the plane-strain failure mode. In this paper, the longitudinal failure mode of a long embankment consisting of homogeneous soils is examined. A probabilistic approach using the first-order reliability method (FORM) is adopted to consider the uncertainty of soil properties. In particular, the spatial variability of the undrained shear strength of the soil is modelled in the probabilistic analysis. Parametric studies are subsequently conducted to examine the influence of this soil characteristic on the failure mode of the long embankment.