Yong Liang, Bodhinanda Chandra and Prof. Kenichi Soga from our group recently published a paper in Computer Methods in Applied Mechanics and Engineering, entitled “Shear band evolution and post-failure simulation by the extended material point method (XMPM) with localization detection and frictional self-contact” (https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cma.2021.114530).
In the proposed work, an enhanced XMPM formulation is developed to simulate the evolution of shear bands and post-failure behaviors in the extremely large-deformation regime. Here, a localization search algorithm based on the theory of bifurcation is integrated into the XMPM to predict the initiation and propagation of discontinuity. In addition, a formulation of self-contact is proposed to deal with the dynamic frictional contact mechanism between the generated shear planes. In order to ensure the smoothness of the discontinuity surface during localization propagation, a hybrid implicit–explicit description of discontinuity is assumed by employing the level-set method and a point cloud approach.
Several numerical examples are investigated to assess the accuracy and demonstrate the capability of the proposed XMPM approach in simulating the shear band evolution of different engineering problems in both 2D and 3D. The proposed formulation also exhibits minor sensitivity with respect to mesh refinements in predicting the shear-band path. To show the optimum performance compared to the regular MPM approach, a simulation of large-deformation heterogeneous slope failure is presented as one of the applications of the proposed method towards simulating real-scale engineering problems.
A video highlighting the work on nonhomogeneous slope stability problem and three-dimensional landslide is shown below.