• Description

Simulate Your Geotechnical Applications

As an add-on to the Structural Mechanics Module, the Geomechanics Module allows you to analyze geotechnical applications, such as tunnels, excavations, slope stability, and retaining structures. Utilizing a number of nonlinear geomechanics material models, it contains tailor-made physics Interfaces for investigating deformation, plasticity, creep, and failure of soils and rocks, and their interactions with piles, supports, and other manufactured structures.

A Variety of Geomechanics Material Models for Great Versatility

The Geomechanics Module comes with standard nonlinear material models that describe metal plasticity through the von Mises and Tresca criteria. Yet, the essence of the Geomechanics Module is the nonlinear material models for soils, concrete, and rock that are built into physics interfaces modeling solid mechanics.

Additional Images:

  • Embankments are used to support a road embankment. Shown are the stresses in the columns and displacement of the surrounding environment (background boundary surface plot).
  • Force is transferred from a concrete beam to its steel reinforcement bars during tension failure. Shown are the von Mises stresses in the concrete and the axial stresses in the bars.
  • Large strain plastic deformation where a tension cut-off criterion has been set.
Soils Rock and Concrete
Cam-Clay William-Warnke
Drucker-Prager Bresler-Pister
Mohr-Coulomb Ottosen
Matsuoka-Nakai Hoek-Brown
Lade-Duncan  

In addition to the pre-defined, built-in plasticity models, you can create user-defined yield functions. These can be created either directly, by manipulating the physics interfaces in the Geomechanics Module, or through the versatile equation-defining physics interface found in COMSOL Multiphysics. User-coded subroutines are not required, as you may simply enter the constitutive equations in the appropriate edit field within the interfaces. These can involve mathematical expressions of the field variables, stress and strain invariants, and derived quantities. If your material model is dependent on another variable, such as a computed temperature field or water pressure, you can directly integrate it into these material definitions. In this way, the provided material models within the Geomechanics Module can also be adapted and extended to a more general class of materials.

The Geomechanics Module can easily be combined with analyses and their describing variables from other modules in the COMSOL Product Suite. This includes, in particular, physics interfaces describing porous media flow, poroelasticity, and solute transport featured in the Subsurface Flow Module.