Fracturing SPH Particles: A New Continuum Approach to Model Desiccation Cracking in Clay Soils
Abstract
Desiccation cracks are formed by the shrinkage of clay soils due to moisture loss. The presence of cracks can induce significant changes in the mechanical, hydrological, physico-chemical and thermal properties of soils, which can lead, for example, to damage of lightly loaded structures (e.g., residential houses) or shallow-buried structures (e.g., gas and water pipelines), progressive slope/dam failures, cracking in road pavements, and the leakage of deep nuclear waste/hazardous gasses from soils. Therefore, understanding the mechanism of desiccation cracking behaviour in clayey soils is vital for dealing with key issues relevant to a range of applications in numerous disciplines such as geotechnical engineering, geo-environment engineering, transport engineering, mining and resource engineering, agricultural engineering and soil science. In this talk, we will present our current effort in developing an advanced computational tool to model shrinkage induced desiccation cracking in clay soils. A new computational approach, namely Fracturing SPH Particles, that combines the smoothed particle hydrodynamics (SPH) method and a new size-dependent constitutive framework capable of describing localised failure problems is proposed. The key advantage of this approach is its capability to describe the fracture geometry through a set of Lagrangian particles, which can freely move in the computational space without being confined to a grid system. Since each SPH particle carries its own cohesive fracture process zone, the new approach can bypass the need to represent the fracture's topology and fracture orientation. The direction of crack propagation is therefore mainly controlled by local stress conditions and material properties. Furthermore, owing to the size-dependent feature of the constitutive model, the proposed method can naturally capture the crack propagation in clay soils without being influenced by the well-known issue associated with spatial-dependent solutions. Several experimental and numerical results will be presented to demonstrate the predictive capabilities of the proposed model.
- Publication:
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AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2019
- Bibcode:
- 2019AGUFMEP11D2115B
- Keywords:
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- 3909 Elasticity and anelasticity;
- MINERAL PHYSICS