Investigation of the shear band evolution in soil-rock mixture using the assumed enhanced strain method with the meshes of improved numerical manifold method

Abstract

Falling into the framework of the Petrov-Galerkin finite element formulation with embedded discontinuity, the assumed enhanced strain (AES) method could simulate the structural localization phenomenon and the associated loss of bearing capacity in a way insensitive to mesh alignment and refinement. For another hand, the improved numerical manifold method (INMM) naturally excels at dealing with heterogeneous problems such as the soil-rock mixture (SRM) slope with embedded soft soil region. Therefore, to simulate the shear band evolution in heterogeneous slope more efficiently, precisely and also mesh independently, this paper proposes to invoke the AES method with the meshes of the INMM. Beside, this paper proposes a simple and efficient method to address the constitutive integration for multi-surface plasticity induced by cutting the tensile part of the Drucker Prager model. Finally, the efficiency and accuracy of the proposed approaches are tested on some typical examples including heterogeneous block and slope.