Consolidation of elastic–plastic saturated porous media by the boundary element method

This paper presents a domain boundary element formulation for inelastic saturated porous media with rate-independent behavior for the solid skeleton. The formulation is then applied to elastic–plastic behavior for the solid.Biot’s consolidation theory, extended to include irreversible phenomena is considered and the direct boundary element technique is used for the numerical solution after time discretization by the implicit Euler backward algorithm. The associated nonlinear algebraic problem is solved by the Newton–Raphson procedure whereby the loading/unloading conditions are fully taken into account and the consistent tangent operator defined. Only domain nodes (nodes defined inside the domain) are used to represent all domain values and the corresponding integrals are computed by using an accurate sub-elementation scheme.The developments are illustrated through the Drucker-Prager elastic–plastic model for the solid skeleton and various examples are analyzed with the proposed algorithms.