Finite Element Analysis of Thermo- Hydro-Mechanical (THM) Model for Strain Localization, Rapid Catastrophic Landslide and Hydraulic Fracturing.

Cao, T. D. (2017). Finite Element Analysis of Thermo- Hydro-Mechanical (THM) Model for Strain Localization, Rapid Catastrophic Landslide and Hydraulic Fracturing. Computational and Applied Mathematics (CAM); Mississippi State University.

This research aims to develop a physical, mathematical and computational model for the virtual simulation of non-isothermal multiphase porous materials under dynamic responses, suitable for environmental engineering and geophysical applications, and the better understanding of some yet unexplained types of geology, e.g. slow earthquakes, the behaviour of faults during earthquakes, hydraulic fracturing in earth-rock (impermeable rock and permeable rock) of pavement problems and dams, etc. These events occur in materials which are porous, of multiphase nature, involve multi-physics aspects and are fully coupled. A fully coupled general mathematical model for the analysis of the thermo-hydro-mechanical behavior of multiphase geomaterials is reduced to a computationally efficient formulation within the u-p-T approach [Cao et al. 2016]. The modified effective stress state is limited by the Drucker-Prager yield surface for simplicity. The standard Galerkin finite element method is applied to discretize the governing equations in space, while the generalized Newmark scheme is used for the time discretization. The final non-linear set of equations is solved by the Newton-Raphson method with a monolithic. Dynamic analysis of a plain strain test for strain localization, rapid catastrophic landslide and hydraulic fracturing is presented.