Analysis of pore pressure influence on failure mechanisms in structural systems

This thesis studies the issue of the overall safety of structures built of heterogeneous and pore-saturated materials under extreme loads in application to fluid-structure interaction problems, such as the dam-reservoir interaction. We propose a numerical model of interaction capable of predicting main tendencies and overall behavior of pore-saturated dam structure interacting with the reservoir in failure analyses of practical interest. The proposed numerical model is first presented in two-dimensional (2D) framework and later extended to three-dimensional (3D) framework. We consider the structure built of porous cohesive material. We assume that the external fluid in interaction with the structure acts as a source of pore saturation. We model the response of the pore-saturated structure with the coupled discrete beam lattice model based on Voronoi cell representation of domain with inelastic Timoshenko beam finite elements enhanced with additional kinematics in terms of embedded strong discontinuities acting as cohesive links. The coupling between the solid phase and the pore fluid is handled with Biot’s porous media theory, and Darcy’s law governing the pore fluid flow. The numerical consideration of internal coupling results with an additional pressure-type degree of freedom placed at each node of the Timoshenko beam finite element, which is later used at the fluidstructure interface. The confined conditions met for external fluid placed in the reservoir enable the modeling of external fluid motion with the acoustic wave theory. For the numerical representation of the external fluid limited to small (irrotational) motion, we choose a Lagrangian formulation and the mixed displacement/pressure based finite element approximation. The end result are the displacement and pressure degrees of freedom per node of external fluid finite elements, which allows for the issue of the fluid-structure interface to be solved in an efficient and straightforward manner by directly connecting the structure and external fluid finite elements at common nodes. As a result, all computations can be performed in a fully monolithic manner. All numerical implementations and computations are performed with the research version of the computer code FEAP (Finite Element Analysis Program). The proposed numerical models of structure, external fluid and ultimately numerical model of interaction are validated in the linear elastic regime of structure response by comparing computed results against reference values obtained either with analytical solutions or continuum models. The numerical simulations in the nonlinear regime of structure response are performed with the aim to demonstrate the proposed coupled discrete beam lattice model capabilities to capture complete macro-scale response and failure mechanisms in pore-saturated structures. Finally, the proposed numerical model of interaction ability to deal with the progressive localized failure of a dam structure built of porous cohesive material under damreservoir interaction for a particular loading program was tested. To account for the temperature effects, the thermal coupling is introduced in the numerical model of the structure.