Advanced Boundary Element analysis of geotechnical problems with geological inclusions

In this work a novel approach is presented for the Boundary Element analysis of problems in geomechanics. Firstly, Non-Uniform Rational B-Spines (NURBS) are used for the description of the geometry and for the approximation of the unknowns. This results in a significant decrease in the number of parameters used for an accurate description of the geometry as well as a decrease in the number of degrees of freedom required for good quality results. Secondly, NURBS are also used for the description of the geometry of geological inclusions, which can have properties different to the rock mass and can experience inelastic behavior. After a short introduction to the theory, some details of implementation are shown. On test examples, involving elastic homogeneous domains, it is first shown that the method delivers accurate results with fewer parameters and number of unknowns as compared with conventional analysis. Solutions are compared to either known solutions or with conventional BEM analyses. Geological inclusions are introduced next and results of test examples are compared with Finite Element analyses. Finally a practical example is shown.