Applying the Drucker-Prager Failure Criterion for Representing Soil Behavior using Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics

Abstract

Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH) has previously used in hydrodynamics as a Lagrangian numerical method to simulate fluid behavior. Recently the SPH is also being used to simulate soil deformation, since the largely known Finite Element Method (FEM) cannot represent the soil deformation after failure. In SPH, soil materials are modeled as a set of particles, and the behavior of those particles can be simplified using the equivalent viscosity or using the soil failure criterion. This research tries to implement the Drucker-Prager model using Fortran platform to simulate a simple soil model deformation behavior, by modifying the previous model that used the equivalent viscosity. A simple model of small slope is built by a stack of SPH particles, which are expected to behave as the collapsing soil mass. The movement of the particles and the change of the model’s geometry are observed visually after the SPH simulation. The preliminary results show that the particles can already behave like a failure in granular soil, yet it still needs to be improved due to the unwanted particle movements.

Keywords

• fortran
• numerical method
• smoothed particle hydrodynamics
• soil constitutive model