Static and pseudo static stability analysis of the medieval castle rock slopes in Slovakia

Abstract

The presented research deals with the stability of the rock slopes in the foundation of selected medieval castles in Slovakia. In the first part a static analysis of the 45 selected medieval castle rock slopes was carried out, where more than 12,000 potentially unstable blocks were analyzed and factor of safety in static condition was calculated using key block theory implemented in the Kbslope module of PTworkshop software. Based on the results of the static stability analysis a pseudo-static analysis was performed adopting the seismic acceleration in accordance to the Slovak technical norm -Seismic actions on structures. This was implemented by calculating vectors of horizontal force acting upon the shear failure in the direction of slope face with the zero vertical component. The obtained results showed, that if we do not take into account the tapered blocks which represented 81 % from the 12,217 investigated blocks in the static conditions, 14 % of blocks were unstable. This figure further increased to 23 % in the pseudo-static condition, when the seismic acceleration was taken into account. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2013.