My fascination with flow problems in Geotechnical Engineering started with a review of landfill landslides. Landfills contain waste materials which show a dual behavior. At static equilibrium, the waste materials tend to behave as conventional geotechnical materials. This can be attributed to the fact that they contain a lot (~60%) of soil-like material. A whole research group at IIT-Delhi is dedicated to Geoenvironmental Engineering
Frequent rainfalls, production of methane and ever increasing level of leachate are root causes of documented landfill slope failures. It has been well appreciated and established, that a visco-elastic-plastic material model for meshless methods can predict these flow failures. Motivated by the this paper, I experimented with the use of SPH to recreate some standard slope stability problems presented in literature. LEM and FEM slope stability methods tend to provide the critical failure slope, with little to no information about the strains and extent of spreading, and this is where the power of SPH lies. Not only does it provide a description of critical failure surface, but also the extent of spreading. The only parameters to play with are, the Yield Criterion (Drucker-Prager), and the Rheological Characteristics of the yielded material (Herschel-Bulkley-Papanastasiou).
Initially, I worked on ANSYS LS-DYNA (which is an explicit dynamics computational tool) for some blast simulations using SPH, but then I gradually moved to DUALSPHPHYSICS for flow and slope stability problems. I published a conference paper, as part of a small research project, on slope stability using FEM, LEM and SPH and is published in IGC 2015 proceedings.
For now, I am not working on any SPH projects, but I plan to work on SPH+DEM coupling later in the future.
