Coupling of soil deformation and pore fluid flow using material point method

This paper presents the formulation and implementation of a numerical procedure based on material point method (MPM) to solve fully coupled dynamic problems that undergo large deformations in saturated soils. The key aspect of this formulation is that it considers two sets of Lagrangian material points to represent soil skeleton and pore water layers. The accuracy of the method is tested by comparing the results to some analytical solutions of consolidation theory. The developed method has been applied to model progressive failure of river levees to illustrate the practical applications. The numerical results show the robustness of the proposed method with regard to large deformations that undergo rapid failure mechanisms. (C) 2014 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd.