Infinite Strength
An Infinite Strength material in Slide2 represents a slip surface "exclusion zone", through which slip surfaces are not allowed to pass. Use an Infinite Strength material when you wish to define a horizontal region through which a failure surface cannot pass but rather slides along the boundary.
For an Infinite Strength material:
- Strength Parameters are disabled.
- Water Parameters are disabled.
"Allow Sliding Along Boundary" - use this option when you have an infinite strength bedrock material at the bottom of your model and want to allow the slip surface to slide along its boundary. This option should otherwise be off.
We do not recommend utilizing infinite strength for defining regions to intentionally prevent surfaces that might otherwise fail through them. The nature of the infinite material is that any slip surface that passes through it is immediately discarded. This means that the program ignores a failure zone even for a very thinly defined infinite strength region (e.g. vertical walls including sheet pile walls and soldier piles) as all surfaces around that zone would be discarded. This is not an entirely representative analysis, as this ignored failure zone may be a critical failure zone that would have been ignored (e.g. high tensile forces behind a wall with infinite strength). This applies for any case where it defines a vertical zone in which a slip surface would normally pass through. We instead recommend using a Mohr-Coulomb material with a very high strength.