On the dynamic behaviour of fluid-saturated soil within the framework of elasto-plasticity

Phenomena related to porous media dynamics, such as wave propagation and liquefaction, are encountered in many engineering applications, especially, in geomechanics and earthquake engineering. Drawing our attention to fluid-saturated granular materials with heterogeneous microstructures, the modelling is carried out within a continuum-mechanical framework by exploiting the well-established macroscopic Theory of Porous Media (TPM) together with thermodynamically consistent constitutive equations. In this regard, the solid skeleton of the soil is described as an elasto-plastic material. The underlying equations are discretised and implemented into the coupled porous-media finite-element solver PANDAS and linked to the commercial finite-element package Abaqus through a general interface. This coupling allows the definition of complex intial-boundary-value problems through Abaqus, thereby using the state-of-the-art material models of PANDAS. In order to get a detailed understanding of the behaviour of the underlying soil model under dynamic loading conditions, a cyclic torsion test is numerically investigated. (© 2012 Wiley-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim)