Determination and stability analysis of ultimate open-pit slope under geomechanical uncertainty

In open-pit mines,pit slope as one of the important parameters affects the mine economy and total minable reserve,and it is also affected by different uncertainties which arising from many sources.One of the most critical sources of uncertainty effects on the pit slope design is rock mass geomechanical properties.By comparing the probability of failure resulted from deterministic procedure and probabilistic one,this paper investigated the effects of aforesaid uncertainties on open-pit slope stability in metal mines.In this way,to reduce the effect of variance,it implemented Latin Hypercube Sampling(LHS)technique.Furthermore,a hypothesis test was exerted to compare the effects on two cases in Middle East.Subsequently,the investigation approved high influence of geomechanical uncertainties on overall pit steepness and stability in both iron and copper mines,though on the first case the effects were just over.

Theoretical analysis of non-probabilistic reliability based on interval model

The aim of this paper is to propose a theoretical approach for performing the nonprobabilistic reliability analysis of structure.Due to a great deal of uncertainties and limited measured data in engineering practice,the structural uncertain parameters were described as interval variables.The theoretical analysis model was developed by starting from the 2-D plane and 3-D space.In order to avoid the loss of probable failure points,the 2-D plane and 3-D space were respectively divided into two parts and three parts for further analysis.The study pointed out that the probable failure points only existed among extreme points and root points of the limit state function.Furthermore,the low-dimensional analytical scheme was extended to the high-dimensional case.Using the proposed approach,it is easy to find the most probable failure point and to acquire the reliability index through simple comparison directly.A number of equations used for calculating the extreme points and root points were also evaluated.This result was useful to avoid the loss of probable failure points and meaningful for optimizing searches in the research field.Finally,two kinds of examples were presented and compared with the existing computation.The good agreements show that the proposed theoretical analysis approach in the paper is correct.The efforts were conducted to improve the optimization method,to indicate the search direction and path,and to avoid only searching the local optimal solution which would result in missed probable failure points.