Dynamic soil consolidation model using a nonlocal continuum poroelastic damage approach

We present a novel dynamic poroelastic model for soil consolidation in an isotropic homogeneous fluid saturated porous media. A nonlocal integral-type continuum damage formulation is applied to describe the damage evolution under dynamic excitations, in which a bilinear damage law is assumed. The governing equations are obtained by considering the conservation of momentum and mass balance for the solid-fluid mixtures, in which the fluid flow obeys Darcy's seepage law in the entire domain. The numerical solution of the fully coupled problem is achieved via a mixed FEM displacement-pressure (u-p) element formulation. The mechanical equilibrium equations are evolved in time using a Newmark method and the resulting nonlinear system is solved via a Newton-Raphson method. Consistent linearization is then used to obtain the block Jacobian matrix analytically and the linear system is solved monolithically at each time step. Several numerical results are presented to study soil consolidation problems under harmonic excitations. We investigate the time-dependence response of the skeleton displacement, pressure, and damage evolution. In addition, the examples demonstrate that the nonlocal integral-type damage model can effectively overcome mesh dependence and yield smooth behavior.

Automated summary

This study presents a novel dynamic poroelastic model for soil consolidation in saturated porous media. Numerical simulations are conducted to investigate soil consolidation under harmonic excitations and demonstrate the effectiveness and stability of the damage model.