Abstract: In order to obtain the critical slip surface of the three-dimensional slope, the construction method of six parameter-controlled three-dimensional slip surface is proposed, and the objective function based on the minimum potential energy stability analysis method is established. The genetic algorithm is used to search the critical slip surface, and the corresponding search process is developed. To validate the rationality of this method, results from this method are compared with the critical slip surface and the minimum safety factor obtained by other methods, and the critical slip surface obtained from the indoor model test is compared against the theoretical search results. The results show that the search method in this paper can achieve steady convergence. Simultaneous change of multivariate search is performed for the examples in this paper, and the results are close to the results from limit equilibrium method, which indicates that the proposed search method is reasonable. The theoretical calculation results are close to the critical slip surface of the slopes obtained from the model loading tests, which again proves that the critical slip surface searching method of the three-dimensional slope is feasible.

Key words: three-dimensional slope, critical slip surface, safety factor, minimum potential energy principle, genetic algorithm