An Explicit Finite Element Method for Saturated Soil Dynamic Problems and Its Application to Seismic Liquefaction Analysis

Abstract

An explicit finite element method is proposed to solve the u-p-formed dynamic equation of saturated porous media. In this method, a special discretization is implemented to discretize the global computational domain into local node systems of the individual nodes, and the dynamic equation of each local node system corresponding to each node is discretized by the completely explicit integration method in the time domain. By cycling through all the nodes, the dynamic responses of the global computational domain are obtained. In addition, a viscoelastic artificial boundary is added in the method. In numerical examples, the proposed FEM is verified by the good agreements between the results obtained from the proposed method and the analytical and numerical solutions of existing methods, respectively. After being embedded in OpenSees software, the proposed method is implemented into analysis of the seismic responses of liquefiable site.