Elastoplastic Finite Element Model for Structural Evolution of Offshore Clay and Its Applications

PhD student (SA-Res)

Wencheng Wei

Supervisors

Prof Hongxiang Tiang (Dalian University of Technology)	Prof Yinghui Tian

Project Start Date: September, 2022

Project Details

With the rapid development of marine resources and offshore infrastructure, the safety and long-term stability of offshore foundations, anchors, and submarine slopes have become increasingly important worldwide. Many key offshore geotechnical problems, such as foundation bearing capacity, anchor uplift resistance, and underwater slope instability, are fundamentally governed by the strength characteristics and progressive failure behaviour of natural marine clays. However, natural clays commonly exhibit pronounced structural features, including inherent anisotropy, spatial nonhomogeneity, strain-softening, and anisotropy evolution during shear deformation, all of which can significantly affect engineering performance. My current research focuses on the constitutive modelling and numerical analysis of structured natural clays considering the coupled effects of these characteristics. In particular, I develop unified undrained shear strength formulations and the advanced elastoplastic CHAS-DP finite element model within the Cosserat continuum framework, which can effectively capture strain localization and progressive failure while overcoming mesh dependency issues in conventional finite element methods. I am particularly interested in clarifying how soil structure and its evolution influence the bearing capacity of shallow foundations and plate anchors, as well as the stability of offshore slopes. The main research methods that interest me include theoretical constitutive modelling, computational geomechanics, large-deformation finite element analysis, and practical applications in offshore geotechnical engineering.