Overcoming volumetric locking in material point methods

Material point methods suffer from volumetric locking when modelling near incompressible materials due to the combination of a low-order computational mesh and large numbers of material points per element. However, large numbers of material points per element are required to reduce integration errors due to non-optimum placement of integration points. This restricts the ability of current material point methods in modelling realistic material behaviour. This paper presents for the first time a method to overcome finite deformation volumetric locking in standard and generalised interpolation material point methods for near-incompressible non-linear solid mechanics. The method does not place any restriction on the form of constitutive model used and is straightforward to implement into existing implicit material point method codes. The performance of the method is demonstrated on a number of two and three-dimensional examples and its correct implementation confirmed through convergence studies towards analytical solutions and by obtaining the correct order of convergence within the global Newton-Raphson equilibrium iterations. In particular, the proposed formulation has been shown to remove the over-stiff volumetric behaviour of conventional material point methods and reduce stress oscillations. It is straightforward to extend this approach to other material point methods and the presented formulation can be incorporated into all existing material point methods available in the literature. (C) 2018 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY license.