ABSTRACT
It is well known that large deformation analysis with the finite element method (FEM) may lead to the numerical difficulty due to mesh tangling even when the updated Lagrangian scheme is adopted. Mesh-free methods have been proposed by the research community to circumvent the difficulty by replacing the conventional connectivity matrix with certain innovative treatments in spatial discretization. In the present paper we develop a spatial discretization procedure for the challenging geotechnical problem involving partially fluid-saturated porous media, based on the Material Point Method (MPM) which could be classified as a particle method for coupled computational fluid dynamics (CFD) and computational solid dynamics (CSD) simulation. Within the original framework of the MPM as proposed by Sulsky, Chen & Schreyer (1994), a continuum body is divided into a finite number of sub-regions consisting of Lagrangian material points, and constitutive equations are formulated and solved at the material points while the equation of motion is solved with the use of the background computational grid. Since this computational grid can be chosen arbitrarily, the mesh tangling problem does not appear in the MPM.
