This $310,085 National Science Foundation project grant will fund the development of a unified numerical framework for understanding co-seismic slope failures at complex sites. Funded under the Engineering program (CFDA 47.041), the two-year award made to Virginia Polytechnic Institute & State University will advance the fundamental understanding of earthquake-triggered slope failures and help predict, reduce, and mitigate their destructive consequences. The grantee will develop and validate a computational tool using the material point method to simulate ground shaking, site response, and large deformations from failure initiation through post-failure processes. Constitutive models accounting for material damping and cyclic mobility will be incorporated. The open-source numerical tool and tutorial manual will allow more comprehensive analysis of risk from earthquake hazards by better capturing pore pressure evolution and the connection between ground motion characteristics and slope instability. Outcomes have the potential to transform approaches to co-seismic slope stability analysis, especially for critical infrastructure.
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