ABSTRACT
Failures of masses of soils are of major interest for engineers and geologists. The social and financial impacts impose a fully understanding of the mechanisms which triggered some failures occurring well before the ultimate state. An essential issue is to predict them. Even if the mechanisms explaining the localization of deformations are still explored, it is now possible to predict their occurrence by using criteria such as the vanishing of the determinant of the so-called acoustic tensor which is derived from the tangential stiffness tensor (Rice 1976). However, a non-negligible amount of catastrophic failures, or collapses, can not be predicted using these criteria or classical elasto-plastic theory. Hence, Darve (1987) and Darve et al. (2004) have proposed a criterion based on the sufficient condition of stability of Hill (1958). On another hand, Nova (1994) and Imposimato and Nova (1998) have shown that an arbitrary applied loading program can lead (or not) to collapses for proper control variables.
