Large-Displacement Numerical Analysis of Soil Failure Mechanism for Soil-Embedded Cylinder Interaction

Conventionally, finite element method (FEM) is used to analyze the soil–embedded structure interaction (SSI) problems. However, the embedded structures and surrounding soil occasionally experience large displacements under environmental and operational excitation, which cannot be robustly simulated by that widely-used approach because of the severely distorted elements. Meanwhile, smoothed particle hydrodynamics (SPH), a Lagrangian mesh-free method, is among the most popular approaches to overcome the disadvantage of FEM in simulating large-displacement problems. This paper proposes a hybrid SPH-FEM method to analyze the large-displacement failure mechanism of soil in SSI problems. A parametric study is conducted using validated numerical model to investigate the effect of burial depth and diameter of the cylinder on the soil failure mechanism.