Implicit numerical integration for a kinematic hardening soil plasticity model

Soil models based on kinematic hardening together with elements of bounding surface plasticity, provide a means of introducing some memory of recent history and stiffness variation in the predicted response of soils, Such models provide an improvement on simple elasto-plastic models in describing soil behaviour under non-monotonic loading. Routine use of such models requires robust numerical integration schemes. Explicit integration of highly non-linear models requires extremely small steps in order to guarantee convergence. Here, a fully implicit scheme is presented for a simple kinematic hardening extension of the Cam clay soil model. The algorithm is based on the operator split methodology and the implicit Euler backward integration scheme is proposed to integrate the rate form of the constitutive relations. This algorithm maintains a quadratic rate of asymptotic convergence when used with a Newton-Raphson iterative procedure. Various strain-driven axisymmetric triaxial paths are simulated in order to demonstrate the efficiency and good performance of the proposed algorithm. Copyright (C) 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.