ABSTRACT
The behaviour of all geomaterials, and in particular of soils, is governed by their interaction with the fluid (water) and gas (air) present in the pore structure. The mechanical model of this interaction when combined with suitable constitutive description of the porous medium and with efficient, discrete, computation procedures, allows most transient and static problems involving deformations to be solved. This chapter describes the basic procedures and the development of a general purpose computer program (SWANDYNE-X) for static and dynamic analyses of saturated and semi-saturated soils. The results of the computations are validated by comparison with experiments. An approximate reconstruction of the failure of the Lower San Fernando Dam during the 1971 earthquake is presented.
