A new approach for assessing stability of rock slopes considering centroids of weak zones

The intersection lines between discontinuity surfaces and their intersection points on the visible surfaces of any engineering structure may be the instability indicators. This paper describes a new approach to modelling the intersecting lines and points that would provide the first evaluation of any instability in an engineering structure characterized by the failure modes. In this work, the intersection lines were grouped according to their direction either in the reverse or in the same direction as the dip of the slope. Furthermore, the intersection lines are grouped according to various ranges of the interior friction angle, which can be selected by the users in a computer application developed for this work. The orientation of the intersecting lines and the location of the exposed intersection points are defined and assigned as the scatter points. These exposed points are clustered to determine the centroid locations. The K-means clustering is used in this step. Finally, all these analyses are integrated in a logical order, and the results obtained are used to assess the instabilities on the slope surface. Experiments are carried out on a rock cut along the Konya-Antalya (Turkey) highway, which is composed of limestone, to demonstrate the performance and results of the approach. The locations of the possible failure zones in the critical range of the interior friction angle are defined both visually and numerically along the slope. Experiments show that the proposed method is very useful and easy to implement and yields practical preliminary evaluation results pertaining to instabilities according to the basic failure modes.