Abstract
Numerical modelling involving saturated and unsaturated soils requires a reasonably accurate and economical way of estimating soil-hydraulic properties. Recent research has shown that the soil-water characteristic curve can be used to establish a number of other unsaturated soil property functions, such as the permeability function, The performance of different proposed functions for both soil-water characteristics curve and permeability function were examined against experimental data. To investigate the influence of these different property functions on transient seepage and slope stability, an idealized unsaturated soil slope was adopted for the parametric study. It was found that significant variation in the soil-hydraulic properties could greatly modify the distribution of pore-water pressure and hence affect the slope factor of safety in a considerable manner.