Shear band static evolution based on complementarity method and the improved numerical manifold method.

The simulation of shear band evolution path is of vital importance in prevention of geotechnical disaster. During shear band evolution, the strain localization condition at all the shear band tips as well as the force equilibrium should be obeyed, which is proposed to be treated as the nonlinear complementarity problem (NCP). Since the partial derivative of this NCP is hard to solve, instead of the Newton method, the projection contraction algorithm (PCA) is invoked to solve the NCP to yield the shear band evolution step length. To reduce the computational expense, the meshes of improved numerical manifold (INMM) are used to discretize the domain of the soil-rock mixture (SRM). Based on the displacement-controlled method (DCM), the plasticity and contact nonlinearities are solved in a unified way. The proposed procedure could naturally simulate the growth of shear band, allowing the shear band tip to stop anywhere, alleviating the mesh dependence. Some types of slope examples are solved to test the performance of the proposed approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]