The failure modes of slopes include not only the shear failure but also the tensile failure

especially in the back of frontier of slopes. The traditional yield criterion of Mohr-Coulomb is difficult to deal with the shear failure with the tensile crack modes in the lower bound limit analysis. The paper reformulates the yield criterion of Mohr-Coulomb with respect to the linearized spatial discretization in the lower bound limit analysis based on finite element method. Meanwhile

a pseudo cohesion is introduced to assure that neither the Mohr-Coulomb yield criterion nor the tensional failure criterion is violated

and a lower bound limit finite element method is developed for analyzing the tenso-shear failure of slopes. The numerical examples illustrate the validity of the proposed method

while showing that if only the shear failure is considered

the factor of safety would be overestimated in the slope stability analysis.