Numerical study of large strain deformation in load induced slope failure using material point method

Abstract

The case of large deformations presents a challenging problem to be simulated numerically. In recent years, the development of meshfree methods especially the Material Point Method (MPM) has gained some tractions and shown some significant progresses. This thesis aims to utilize this method for analyzing a large deformation case found in load induced slope failure. Thus, a hypothetical slope geometry is chosen to be modeled and analyze in regard to varying soil strength parameter and incremental uniform load. Next, the results are divided into two criteria, small strain deformation and large strain deformation. Then, a comparison study is performed between MPM and Finite Element Method (FEM) in the small strain deformation region in order to investigate MPM. The outcome shows that MPM produce relatively consistent results compared to FEM results in all the case variants. In the large deformation region, MPM also presents failure geometries along with the corresponding mechanical properties throughout the failure process. However, there are also numerical errors which is happening in all the cases. These errors are causing inaccurate results on some small region in the model and even breaking the model altogether in some worse cases.