Application of smoothed particle hydrodynamics (SPH) for simulating various geotechnical problems

Geotechnical engineering is considered one of the oldest disciplines in civil engineering. To date, to extract hidden information, numerical simulations have been performed using the traditional grid-based numerical approach in the Eulerian framework. However, this may not capture some geotechnical engineering problems caused by the large deformations of geomaterials. Therefore, in this research, an attempt is made to develop a particle-based method using smoothed particle hydrodynamics (SPH), which has proven to be an effective option for modeling geomaterials, to solve these problems through running different sets of numerical simulations. The developed model is validated using some benchmark solutions and then two important geotechnical problems, namely the bearing capacity and seepage flow profiles, are simulated. The simulated results represent the actual scenario quite well. Also, the flow process in terms of the accumulated strain is evaluated at different times, with the model justifying the proposed approach for simulating geotechnical problems.