Vegetation is widely used as an environmentally friendly restoration for stabilizing soil slopes. Given the lack of design methods that consider the effects of grass on the hydro-thermal-mechanical properties of soil slopes, a numerical approach to studying these effects for unsaturated soil slope stability was proposed. Hokkaido University realized that they needed flexible geotechnical simulation and analysis software to predict and compare modeling results to comprehensive field measurements in landslide prone areas.

They selected PLAXIS to perform the numerical seepage and slope stability analysis, proving that grass root resists the shallow landslide-prone area. Bentley’s application enabled researchers at Hokkaido University to reduce time and costs compared to time-consuming manual triaxial tests for studying shear strengths. Over the long term, they expect the digital geotechnical analysis to be useful for understanding the performance of grassed soil slopes.