Liquefaction of fluid-saturated soils

Liquefaction phenomena are encountered in many engineering applications, especially, in geomechanics and earthquake engineering. Drawing our attention to fluid-saturated granular materials with heterogeneous microstructures, the modelling is carried out within a continuum-mechanical framework by exploiting the macroscopic Theory of Porous Media (TPM) together with thermodynamically consistent constitutive equations. In this regard, the solid skeleton of the water-saturated soil is described as an elasto-plastic material with isotropic hardening properties and a stress-dependent failure surface. The underlying equations are discretised and implemented into the coupled porous-media finite-element solver PANDAS and linked to the commercial finite-element package Abaqus via a general interface. This coupling allows for the definition of complex intial-boundary-value problems through Abaqus, thereby using the material models of PANDAS. The governing soil model is used to simulate specific liquefaction phenomena, where the underlying initial-boundary-value problems are inspired by practically relevant scenarios.