ABSTRACT
The DEM model of penetration test is made up of a rectangular container filled with a well compacted, poly-dispersed assembly of round particles and a model pile with a triangular tip (two inclined planes forming 60° with the vertical) pushed gradually into the granular foundation. The friction coefficient of the model pile was set to 0.5. As illustrated in Figure 1a, only the right half of the model is used by taking advantage of the axial symmetry of the problem. All the boundary walls are fixed. The bottom and left wall are set to be frictionless, while the right wall is frictional with a friction coefficient of 0.9 to minimize any relative slip between the particles and the wall. The model has the width 2 W and height H of 480 mm, and a pile diameter B of 16 mm.
