SSAP — The Complete Guide: Free Limit Equilibrium Slope Stability Analysis
SSAP is software for the stability analysis of natural and man-made slopes, developed by geologist Lorenzo Borselli. It is completely free, including for professional use, but it is not open source, and receiving updates requires registration.
SSAP — Slope Stability Analysis
Lorenzo Borselli, Università di San Luis Potosí
Limit equilibrium slope stability analysis, with automatic search for the critical surface.
Get it from the vendorWhat you get
- Limit equilibrium methods — Morgenstern-Price, Spencer, Janbu, Bishop and others.
- Automatic search — for the critical slip surface, including non-circular surfaces.
- Ground conditions — soil layers, groundwater level and pore pressures.
- Reinforcement and loads — anchors, piles, geosynthetics, retaining walls and external loads.
- Seismic — pseudo-static analysis, plus a report with graphics to attach to a submission.
What to know
SSAP is one of the very few free tools in this field that reaches the coverage of commercial packages. It runs on Windows only, and the interface is not modern. The required safety factors and load cases come from the standard that applies to you.
Related tools
For the US Federal Highway Administration’s collection of free geotechnical tools — FHWA Geotechnical Software. For advanced finite element analysis of soil and structure — code_aster or OpenSees.
Code_Aster
EDF
EDF industrial finite element solver — nonlinear, dynamic and thermo-mechanical, open source.
Get it from the vendor
OpenSees
Pacific Earthquake Engineering Research Center, UC Berkeley
Nonlinear and dynamic structural analysis driven by scripts, from the earthquake engineering world.
Get it from the vendor
QGIS
QGIS.org
Open-source GIS for spatial analysis, layer work and map production.
Get it from the vendorThe bottom line
SSAP is serious, free software for checking slope stability — suited to geotechnical consultants, geologists and students.