Shear banding and cracking in unsaturated porous media through a nonlocal THM meshfree paradigm

TL;DR

This paper introduces a nonlocal thermo-hydro-mechanical model within a periporomechanics framework, implemented via a meshfree algorithm, to simulate shear banding and cracking in unsaturated soils caused by temperature effects.

Contribution

It develops a novel thermo-hydro-mechanical model integrated into periporomechanics and implements it with a meshfree algorithm for the first time.

Findings

Successfully models shear banding bifurcation due to temperature.

Demonstrates robustness of the meshfree implementation.

Validates the approach with numerical examples.

Abstract

The thermo-hydro-mechanical of unsaturated soils plays a significant role in dynamic shear banding and fracturing. In this article, we propose a thermo-hydro-mechanical material model in the periporomechanics paradigm to model shear banding and crack triggered by temperature. Periporomechanics is a nonlocal framework for the mechanics of unsaturated soil where a length scale dictates the nonlocal interaction between material points. Periporomechanics unites continuous and discontinuous deformation and fluid flow in porous media. As a new contribution, we incorporate the thermo-hydro-mechanical material model in the periporomechanics through the correspondence principle for modeling shear banding and cracking in unsaturated porous media. The stabilized PPM correspondence principle that mitigates the multiphase zero-energy mode instability is augmented. At the global level, we have numerically implemented the periporomechanics paradigm through an explicit Lagrangian meshfree algorithm in the global level. At the local level, we impose the return mapping algorithm to implement the thermo-hydro-mechanical constitutive model. We present numerical examples to demonstrate the efficacy and robustness of proposed periporomechanics for modeling the shear banding bifurcation and crack in unsaturated porous media triggered by temperature.