ABSTRACT
Strengthening of just the shear bands is a patented idea to prevent a critical failure mech anism in order to increase the capacity of a geotechnical system with a minimum of material. Numerical modelling is used to examine this proposed method for limit load increase. Two basic geotechnical systems are analysed using OptumG2 for finite element limit analysis (fela): a shallow foundation with bearing failure and a retaining wall with horizontal wall movement resulting in the active earth wedge. An automated procedure identifies and enhances the shear band using a coupling of OptumG2 with MATLAB. The fela is performed with OptumG2 and run from a MATLAB script, which identifies the shear band based on the simulation result, sets the area of shear band enhancement and reruns the fela. The numerical simulations show that the shear band enhancement leads to a capacity increase for a simple geotechnical system.
