ABSTRACT
A cohesion-softening Mohr-Coulomb soil model has been implemented into an adaptive mesh refinement algorithm and used to model passive earth pressure failure. Load-displacement results are presented for smooth and rough walls, and the influence of minimum element size on these results has been investigated. The developing failure mechanism for the rough wall has been studied using various contour plots. These show that mesh adaptivity has been successful in simulating behaviour observed in experiments.
