numerical modelling of the propagation of fast landslides using the finite element method this paper proposes a two dimensional 2d model for the analysis of the propagation of fast landslides involving a fluidized material such as debris and mud flows flowslides and avalanching flows the model is based on the navier stokes depth integrated equations to incorporate the effect of steep slopes and centrifugal forces due to the high velocities characterizing the flowslides and the bed curvature a curvilinear system of reference is used the corresponding equations of motion are complemented by depth averaged constitutive equations and bed friction laws the resulting set of differential equations are solved using the two step taylor galerkin algorithm this algorithm has been used by the authors to solve hydraulic and dam break problems using the finite element method owing to the importance of the source term compared to the advection component the proposed algorithm follows a splitting scheme using a fourth order runge kutta method for integrating the friction and slope components the performance of the overall approach has been checked in a number of examples the analysis of the results provides insights into the key elements of the model and shows the adequacy of the method to solve real problems where merging and splitting of the flow occur copyright 2004 john wiley sons ltd

smoothed particle hydrodynamics stability analysis abstract sph smoothed particle hydrodynamics is a gridless lagrangian technique which is appealing as a possible alternative to numerical techniques currently used to analyze large deformation events recent tests of the standard sph method using the cubic b spline kernel indicated the possibility of an instability in the tensile regime even though no such difficulties were observed in compression a von neumann stability analysis of the sph algorithm has been carried out which identifies the criterion for stability or instability in terms of the stress state and the second derivative of the kernel function the analysis explains the observation that the method is unstable in tension while apparently stable in compression but shows that it is possible to construct kernel functions which are stable in tension and unstable in compression the instability is shown to result from an effective stress with a negative modulus imaginary sound speed being produced by the interaction between the constitutive relation and the kernel function and is not caused by the numerical time integration algorithm that is changes in the effective stress act to amplify rather than reduce perturbations in the strain the analysis and the stability criterion provide insight into possible methods for removing the instability

stabilized low order finite elements for failure and localization problems in undrained soils and foundations abstract geomaterials in general and soils in particular are highly nonlinear materials presenting a very strong coupling between solid skeleton and intersticial water in the limit of zero compressibility of water and soil grains and zero permeability which correspond to the classical undrained assumption of soil mechanics the functions used to interpolate displacements and pressures must fulfill either the babuska brezzi conditions or the much simpler patch test proposed by zienkiewicz and taylor these requirements exclude the use of elements with equal order interpolation for pressures and displacements for which spurious oscillations may appear the simplest elements with continuous pressures which can be used in 2d are the quadratic triangle and quadrilateral with linear and bilinear pressures respectively the purpose of this paper is to present a stabilization technique allowing the use of both linear triangles for displacements and pressures t3p3 and bilinear quadrilaterals q4p4 the proposed element will be applied to obtain limit loads and failure surfaces in simple boundary value problems for which analytical solutions exist

an implicit corrected sph formulation for thermal diffusion with linear free surface boundary conditions the smoothed particle hydrodynamics sph method has proven useful for modeling large deformation of fluids including fluids with stress free surfaces because of the lagrangian nature of the method it is well suited to address the thermal evolution of these free surface flows boundary conditions at the interface of the fluid with a solid wall are usually enforced through the use of boundary particles however applying conditions at free surfaces in particular gradient boundary conditions can be problematic with traditional sph formulations due to the degradation of the gradient approximation in these regions compounding this difficulty is that traditional approximations of the laplacian operator suffer a similar degradation near free surfaces a new sph formulation of the laplacian operator is presented which improves the accuracy near free surface boundaries this new form is based on a gradient approximation commonly used in thermal viscous and pressure projection problems but includes higher order terms in the appropriate taylor series comparisons with other approximations of second order derivatives are given the discretization is tested by solving steady state and transient problems of thermal diffusion using the backward euler method with a gmres solver boundary conditions are imposed through an augmented matrix copyright 2008 john wiley sons ltd

relational duals of the c means clustering algorithms abstract the hard and fuzzy c means algorithms are widely used effective tools for the problem of clustering n objects into hard or fuzzy groups of similar individuals when the data is available as object data consisting of a set of n feature vectors in rp however object data algorithms are not directly applicable when the n objects are implicitly described in terms of relational data which consists of a set of n2 measurements of relations between each of the pairs of objects new relational versions of the hard and fuzzy c means algorithms are presented here for the case when the relational data can reasonably be viewed as some measure of distance some convergence properties of the algorithms are given along with a numerical example

normalized sph with stress points smoothed particle hydrodynamics is extended to a normalized staggered particle formulation with boundary conditions a companion set of interpolation points is introduced that carry the stress velocity gradient and other derived field variables the method is stable linearly consistent and has an explicit treatment of boundary conditions also a new method for finding neighbours is introduced which selects a minimal and robust set and is insensitive to anisotropy in the particle arrangement test problems show that these improvements lead to increased accuracy and stability published in 2000 by john wiley sons ltd

mixed stabilized finite element methods in nonlinear solid mechanics part i formulation abstract this paper exploits the concept of stabilized finite element methods to formulate stable mixed stress displacement and strain displacement finite elements for the solution of nonlinear solid mechanics problems the different assumptions and approximations used to derive the methods are exposed the proposed procedure is very general applicable to 2d and 3d problems implementation and computational aspects are also discussed showing that a robust application of the proposed formulation is feasible numerical examples show that the results obtained compare favorably with those obtained with the corresponding irreducible formulation

variational and momentum preservation aspects of smooth particle hydrodynamic formulations this paper presents a new variational framework for various existing smooth particle hydrodynamic sph techniques and presents a new corrected sph formulation the linear and angular momentum preserving properties of sph formulations are also discussed the paper will show that in general in order to preserve angular momentum the sph equations must correctly evaluate the gradient of a linear velocity field a corrected algorithm that combines kernel correction with gradient correction is presented the paper will illustrate the theory presented with several examples relating to simple free surface flows

an analysis of time discretization in the finite element solution of hyperbolic problems abstract the problem of the time discretization of hyperbolic equations when finite elements are used to represent the spatial dependence is critically examined a modified equation analysis reveals that the classical second order accurate time stepping algorithms i e the lax wendroff leap frog and crank nicolson methods properly combine with piecewise linear finite elements in advection problems only for small values of the time step on the contrary as the courant number increases the numerical phase error does not decrease uniformly at all wavelengths so that the optimal stability limit and the unit cfl property are not achieved these fundamental numerical properties can however be recovered while still remaining in the standard galerkin finite element setting by increasing the order of accuracy of the time discretization this is accomplished by exploiting the taylor series expansion in the time increment up to the third order before performing the galerkin spatial discretization using piecewise linear interpolations as a result it appears that the proper finite element equivalents of second order finite difference schemes are implicit methods of incremental type having third and fourth order global accuracy on uniform meshes taylor galerkin methods numerical results for several linear examples are presented to illustrate the properties of the taylor galerkin schemes in one and two dimensional calculations

a taylor galerkin algorithm for shock wave propagation and strain localization failure of viscoplastic continua abstract this paper presents a taylor galerkin algorithm formulated in terms of velocities and stresses which can be applied to solid dynamics problems requiring good resolution of small wavelengths such as propagation of shocks the proposed model is both fast as it uses simple linear elements triangles in 2d and tetrahedra in 3d and accurate it mitigates locking and mesh alignment problems and therefore can be applied to localized failure computations without the limitations exhibited by the classical displacement formulations

consistent pseudo derivatives in meshless methods a meshless petrov galerkin formulation is developed in which derivatives of the trial functions are obtained as a linear combination of derivatives of shepard functions a key contribution is the development of conditions on test functions and trial functions for nonintegrable pseudo derivatives for petrov galerkin method which pass the patch test numerical results show that the resulting method is substantially more accurate than the galerkin method with shepard approximants and exceeds the rate of convergence of linear finite elements

shallow water problems a general explicit formulation this paper gives a general formulation for shallow water equations which is capable of solving problems of induced harbour oscillation tidal flow tsunami propagation dispersion of pollutant etc the shallow water equations are written in a novel fully conservative form the solution algorithm is based on an explicit time integration procedure which exploits the conservative properties of the governing equations and incorporates accurate treatment of convective terms without introduction of artificial damping its accuracy and low cost of computation make it attractive with regard to existing procedures

etale groupoids arising from products of shifts of finite type abstract two conjectures about homology groups k groups and topological full groups of minimal etale groupoids on cantor sets are formulated we verify these conjectures for many examples of etale groupoids including products of etale groupoids arising from one sided shifts of finite type furthermore we completely determine when these product groupoids are mutually isomorphic also the abelianization of their topological full groups is computed they are viewed as generalizations of the higher dimensional thompson groups

a new stabilized enhanced strain element with equal order of interpolation for soil consolidation problems abstract in order to accurately model the behaviour of geostructures it is usually not possible to neglect the interaction between the soil skeleton and the pore fluid classical finite element models taking into account this interaction are formulated in terms of the displacement and pore pressure fields and are based on the assumption that the fluid acceleration relative to the soil skeleton is negligible this type of mixed problems is similar to others found in solid and fluid mechanics and might give rise to numerical instabilities unless certain requirements are met there are two classical approaches to this problem the first is usually known as the zienkiewicz taylor patch test for mixed formulations as a consequence of this test the interpolation degree of the displacement field is required to be higher than the corresponding one of the pressure field mathematically speaking this is a necessary condition for stability the second approach mathematically more involved is usually known as the bab ska brezzi inf sup condition and constitutes a sufficient condition for stability however it is possible to obtain stable formulations circumventing the interpolation degree requirement through the so called stabilization techniques these techniques were initially applied in the context of fluid mechanics and later extended to solid mechanics this article presents a new formulation in which stabilization is achieved through an approach based on the simo rifai enhanced strain element

simulating free surface flows with sph the sph smoothed particle hydrodynamics method is extended to deal with free surface incompressible flows the method is easy to use and examples will be given of its application to a breaking dam a bore the simulation of a wave maker and the propagation of waves towards a beach arbitrary moving boundaries can be included by modelling the boundaries by particles which repel the fluid particles the method is explicit and the time steps are therefore much shorter than required by other less flexible methods but it is robust and easy to program

a taylor galerkin method for convective transport problems a method is described to derive finite element schemes for the scalar convection equation in one or more space dimensions to produce accurate temporal differencing the method employs forward time taylor series expansions including time derivatives of second and third order which are evaluated from the governing partial differential equation this yields a generalized time discretized equation which is successively discretized in space by means of the standard bubnov galerkin finite element method the technique is illustrated first in one space dimension with linear elements and euler leap frog and crank nicolson time stepping several interesting relations with standard galerkin and recently developed petrov galerkin methods emerge and the new taylor galerkin schemes are found to exhibit particularly high phase accuracy with minimal numerical damping the method is successively extended to deal with variable coefficient problems and multi dimensional situations

a corrective smoothed particle method for boundary value problems in heat conduction combining the kernel estimate with the taylor series expansion is proposed to develop a corrective smoothed particle method cspm this algorithm resolves the general problem of particle deficiency at boundaries which is a shortcoming in standard smoothed particle hydrodynamics ssph in addition the method s ability to model derivatives of any order could make it applicable for any time dependent boundary value problems an example of the applications studied in this paper is unsteady heat conduction which is governed by second order derivatives numerical results demonstrate that besides the capability of directly imposing boundary conditions the present method enhances the solution accuracy not only near or on the boundary but also inside the domain published in 1999 by john wiley sons ltd this article is a u s government work and is in the public domain in the united states

an iterative stabilized fractional step algorithm for finite element analysis in saturated soil dynamics abstract the discretization of the u p model for saturated porous media results in the semi discrete system of mixed type in displacements and pressures the babuska brezzi condition or the simpler patch test proposed by zienkiewicz and taylor precludes the use of elements with the equal low order of interpolation for u and p unless special stabilization techniques such as the fractional step algorithms are used the purpose of this paper is to present a modified version of the fractional step algorithm which allows much larger time step sizes than those for the existing ones the method is based on introducing an iteration algorithm the numerical experiments demonstrate the effectiveness and improved performance of the proposed modified version of the fractional step algorithm

mixed stabilized finite element methods in nonlinear solid mechanics part ii strain localization this paper deals with the question of strain localization associated with materials which exhibit softening due to tensile straining a standard local isotropic rankine damage model with strain softening is used as exemplary constitutive model both the irreducible and mixed forms of the problem are examined and stability and solvability conditions are discussed lack of uniqueness and convergence difficulties related to the strong material nonlinearities involved are also treated from this analysis the issue of local discretization error in the pre localization regime is deemed as the main difficulty to be overcome in the discrete problem focus is placed on low order finite elements with continuous strain and displacement fields triangular p1p1 and quadrilateral q1q1 although the presented approach is very general numerical examples show that the resulting procedure is remarkably robust it does not require the use of auxiliary tracking techniques and the results obtained do not suffer from spurious mesh bias dependence

wave propagation and localization problems in saturated viscoplastic geomaterials this paper presents an improved algorithm to deal with wave propagation and localization problems in saturated viscoplastic geomaterials it consists of a mixed formulation in terms of effective stress velocity and pore pressure that uses a fractional step algorithm allowing the use of equal order of interpolation for the three variables and the simplest element such as the linear triangle the viscoplastic model used is of modified cam clay type viscoplasticity results in a strong source term that deteriorates the accuracy of the two step taylor galerkin algorithm therefore a runge kutta splitting scheme has been used to deal with the source terms resulting in a better accuracy of the method copyright 2006 john wiley sons ltd

comparison of some finite element methods for solving the diffusion convection reaction equation abstract in this paper we describe several finite element methods for solving the diffusion convection reaction equation none of them is new although the presentation is non standard in an effort to emphasize the similarities and differences between them in particular it is shown that the classical supg method is very similar to an explicit version of the characteristic galerkin method whereas the taylor galerkin method has a stabilization effect similar to a sub grid scale model which is in turn related to the introduction of bubble functions

a stabilized fractional step runge kutta taylor sph algorithm for coupled problems in geomechanics abstract failure of geomaterials with pores filled with fluids is an important research area in both civil and geological engineering many finite element formulations for coupled problems present difficulties such as overestimating failure loads or mesh alignment dependence resulting on spurious failure mechanisms moreover the spaces where field variables are approximated have to fulfill additional requirements ensuring stability stress velocity pore pressure formulations in fe analysis provide accurate results for wave propagation and failure analysis however finite elements present important limitations when deformations are large the purpose of this paper is to present a stabilized fractional step sph algorithm which combines the advantages of the sph method for large deformation problems with those of the taylor galerkin algorithm used within the finite element framework

incompressibility without tears how to avoid restrictions of mixed formulation the severe restrictions of the babuska brezzi stability criteria permit only a limited number of interpolations for velocities displacements and pressure to be used for incompressible behaviour these restrictions preclude the use of many useful elements we show in this paper how such difficulties can be side stepped by seeking the steady state solution through the use of various time marching schemes this permits a simple iterative approach to incompressible or nearly incompressible problems of fluid mechanics or solid mechanics and provides a stimulus for the use of such procedures in metal forming flow etc

triangles and tetrahedra in explicit dynamic codes for solids explicit dynamic codes which are used currently for the study of plastic deformations in impact or with some modification for metal forming suffer two serious limitations first only quadrilateral or hexahedral linear elements can be used thus limiting the possibilities of adaptive refinement and adaptive meshing second even with the use of such elements special devices such as reduced integration must be introduced to avoid locking and reduce costs these necessitate complex hour glass control mending type procedures the main difficulties are those due to the need of treatment of almost incompressible deformation modes recently similar difficulties have been overcome in the context of fluid dynamics soil dynamics and we show here how the processes introduced there can be adopted effectively to the present problem thus allowing an almost unrestricted choice of element interpolations 1998 john wiley sons ltd

a class of mixed assumed strain methods and the method of incompatible modes a three field mixed formulation in terms of displacements stresses and an enhanced strain field is presented which encompasses as a particular case the classical method of incompatible modes within this frame work incompatible elements arise as particular compatible mixed approximations of the enhanced strain field the conditions that the stress interpolation contain piece wise constant functions and be l2 ortho gonal to the enhanced strain interpolation ensure satisfaction of the patch test and allow the elimination of the stress field from the formulation the preceding conditions are formulated in a form particularly convenient for element design as an illustration of the methodology three new elements are developed and shown to exhibit good performance a plane 3d elastic plastic quad an axisymmetric element and a thick plate bending quad the formulation described herein is suitable for non linear analysis

modeling low reynolds number incompressible flows using sph the method of smoothed particle hydrodynamics sph is extended to model incompressible flows of low reynolds number for such flows modification of the standard sph formalism is required to minimize errors associated with the use of a quasi incompressible equation of state treatment of viscosity state equation kernel interpolation and boundary conditions are described simulations using the method show close agreement with series solutions for couette and poiseuille flows furthermore comparison with finite element solutions for flow past a regular lattice of cylinders shows close agreement for the velocity and pressure fields the sph results exhibit small pressure fluctuations near curved boundaries further improvements to the boundary conditions may be possible which will reduce these errors a similar method to that used here may permit the simulation of other flows at low reynolds numbers using sph further development will be needed for cases involving free surfaces or substantially different equations of state