Stability Analysis of Reinforced and Unreinforced Embankments on Soft Ground Available to Purchase

General solutions are developed for the rotational stability analysis of an embankment with and without reinforcement constructed on soft ground that has an undrained shear strength varying with depth. The general cases of an embankment having a berm, dry or wet tensile cracks, and multiple layers of reinforcement are considered. The additional friction caused by the reinforcement force normal to the slip plane is incorporated into the solution. The solutions are presented in the form of simple equations. The relationship between the critical slip circles through the embankment with and without reinforcement is expressed explicitly. The analysis procedures and supporting graphs allow the user to obtain the solutions using hand computations. A simple computer program in the form of a worksheet was developed to quickly obtain the final results. Applications and illustrative examples of embankments with one and two step berms, and distributed loads are given. The results obtained using the approach presented in this paper compare very well to the solutions obtained from the method of slices using the computer programs SB SLOPE and PC STABL6.