Significance of Soil Dilatancy in Slope Stability Analysis

A finite-element approach is used to analyze the slope stability problem and to examine the effect of soil dilatancy on the stability of slopes. It is found that soil dilatancy has a significant effect on the stability of slopes, and that higher values of dilation angle lead to larger stability numbers. Therefore, the stability numbers obtained from limit analyses (lower/upper bound solutions) are not conservative for granular soils that exhibit a dilation angle smaller than a soil's friction angle.