Modelling large deformation and soil–water–

structure interaction with Anura3D

Alexander Rohe (Deltares Delft, The Netherlands, alex.rohe@deltares.nl)

Núria Pinyol (CIMNE/UPC Barcelona, Spain, nuria.pinyol@upc.edu)
Francesca Ceccato (University of Padova, Italy, francesca.ceccato@dicea.unipd.it)
Alba Yerro (VirginiaTech Blacksburg, United States, ayerro@vt.edu)
James Fern (University of California Berkeley, United States, james.fern@berkeley.edu)
Alexander Chmelnizkij (Hamburg University of Technology, Germany,
alexander.chmelnizkij@tuhh.de)

Large deformation and soil–water–structure interaction exists in many environmental

and civil engineering problems such as landslides and slope instabilities, installation of
piles, settlements due to consolidation processes, fluidisation and sedimentation
processes in submerged slopes, internal erosion in dykes, and scouring around
offshore structures. Modelling these processes is challenging due to hydro-mechanical
coupling, large deformation, and contact problems.

The material point method (MPM) is a numerical approach capable of modelling large
deformations and recently, within the framework of the Anura3D MPM Research
Community [1], it has been extended to cope with soil–water–structure interaction.

The Anura3D software uses a dynamic explicit MPM formulation based on a multiple
set of material points (Figure 1a). Anura3D is capable of simulating multi-phase
materials (dry, saturated, unsaturated soil) and free surface water. A fully coupled
hydro-mechanical approach is implemented to model the interaction between soil,
water and gas phases in fully and partially saturated porous media, which is
understood as a continuum mixture of solid skeleton and pore liquids. Additionally,
contact problems can be solved since an advanced contact algorithm is available. A
library of material constitutive laws is included as well as a UMAT-style interface for
external user-defined soil models subroutines.

For the Anura3D v2017.2 MPM software, a GiD interface is developed for creating the
geometry and the mesh, defining material parameters and boundary conditions and
specifying calculation parameters. The calculation is performed by a stand-alone
Anura3D executable. The results can be visualised in ParaView (Figure 1b).
a) b)

Figure 1: a) Multi-phase and multi-material point approach in Anura3D MPM Software.

b) Anura3D input interface in GiD, output in ParaView and code kernel in Fortran.

Reference
[1] Anura3D (2017). Anura3D MPM Research Community. http://www.Anura3D.com.