Simulation of Desiccation Cracking in Clayey Soil Using FEM–MPM Coupling Method

The global warming effect has long been a question of great interest since it encompasses not only rising average temperature, but also extreme weather events: rainfall and droughts of unusual duration. As a consequence, soils undergo excessive swelling and shrinkage cycles, which lead to irreversible deformations, such as cracks, causing considerable damage in earth structures. In this context, the aim of this paper is to study the effect of the shrinkage phenomena in the desiccation term and simulate the crack propagation in a thin clayey soil layer by developing a model that relates porosity resolution with suction and tensile strength. To address this issue, many numerical methods were developed in previous studies, especially the Finite Element Method (FEM), widely used in geotechnical applications. Owing to the limitation of this method in re-meshing and dealing with large deformations, the authors were prompted to couple FEM with a mesh-free method, the Material Point Method (MPM) in order to overcome the individual drawbacks of each method. As a consequence, a clear and connected crack pattern was observed, and the problem of mesh dependency was clearly overcome.