Itasca is particularly well-known for examining complex problems involving slope instabilities in soil and rock. One specialty is assessment of slope stability and design on scales ranging from civil engineering slopes in soil and rock, including portals, to mine benches and inter-ramps for many of the world’s largest open-pit mines. Another is analysis of both the static and dynamic stability of waste dumps, leach piles, and tailings dams. Itasca’s roles include slope design, instrumentation, remediation, and back-analysis. Itasca’s software provides realistic deformations and failure mechanisms (including multiple failure modes), enabling Service Limit State and Ultimate Limit State analyses as well as Factor of Safety analyses. Numerical analyses can also take construction stages into account and many material models are available to represent a wide variety of soil and rock for realistic behaviors for both static and dynamic conditions, including liquefaction.
Specific services provided include:
- Geotechnical mapping and assessment of rock mass structure and in-situ properties for use in design
- Dewatering and depressurization investigation and design, monitoring, numerical groundwater flow modeling, and coupling of the dewatering and depressurization program to geotechnical stability of the slopes
- Blast design
- Specification of instrumentation for monitoring slope movements
- Microseismic instrumentation, data collection, and interpretation
- Numerical modeling to design and assess stability, and estimate slope factors of safety (FS)
- Specification of slope remediation measures
- Back-analysis of slope failures