ABSTRACT
In soil mechanics and geotechnical engineering large strains may occur, for example, during pile installation, penetration of sounding tools, and slope failure. For these problems the classical Lagrangian and Eulerian finite element methods are often inapplicable. In the total and updated Lagrangian approaches generally applied to solid mechanics, the element mesh follows the material deformations so that solution may fail to proceed due to severe element distortion. Remeshing plus projection of the solution, also referred to as rezoning, is computationally expensive, and simple non-conservative projection methods based on interpolation introduce errors. Eulerian finite element approaches, which are generally applied by the computational fluid dynamics (CFD) community, keep the mesh fixed in space. This, however, makes the treatment of path dependent constitutive equations, free surfaces, and moving boundaries cumbersome.
