Progressive Failure Mechanism of Sensitive Clay Slopes: Insights From Stabilized Smoothed Particle Finite Element Analysis of the 2010 Saint‐Jude Landslide
Wei‐Hai Yuan, Ren‐Yuan Xing, Ming Liu, Ding Wang, Beibing Dai, Wei Zhang
Abstract
ABSTRACT Modeling landslides in sensitive clay has long been a challenging issue. In sensitive clays, the shear strength significantly decreases during plastic deformation, leading to the progressive failure of the slopes. Sensitive clays exhibit complex mechanical behavior, and even a small slope failure can often trigger massive landslides. This necessitates a numerical approach capable of handling large deformations, as well as a suitable constitutive model to accurately capture the intricate behavior of these clays. In this study, a novel viscosity‐based hourglass‐control algorithm is proposed to stabilize the node integration in smoothed particle finite element method (SPFEM), and two verification examples are given to demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed method. Then, the proposed stabilized SPFEM is employed to reconstruct the 2010 Saint‐Jude landslide in Quebec, Canada. The method successfully reproduces the progressive failure processes of the Saint‐Jude landslide and quantitatively compares the final run‐out distances and retrogression distances with the field survey data, showing a good agreement.