ZSOIL.PC: A UNIFIED APPROACH TO STABILITY, BEARING CAPACITY, CONSOLIDATION, CREEP AND FLOW FOR TWO AND THREE-DIMENSIONAL SIMULATIONS IN GEOTECHNICAL PRACTICE.1/
Th. Zimmermann 1,2, A. Truty 2, A. Urbanski 3,1, S. Commend 2 & K. Podles 3,1
1 - Zace Services Ltd, Lausanne Switzerland
2 - Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne, Switzerland
3 - Cracow University of Technology, Poland

1. Introduction

Z_SOIL.PC offers an attractive alternative to traditional approaches to geotechnical problems. It uses recent advances in nonlinear finite element techniques and plastic modeling of soils to solve stability, load carrying capacity, deformation and creep problems, including consolidation of two-phase media and transient flow, with excavation sequences, in a unified cost-effective way. Thermal effects and moisture migration are included in the latest version .

In this article the preprocessing is described first, then constitutive models and finally postprocessing. The theoretical and numerical descriptions are limited to the most essential aspects. Selected benchmarks are discussed to illustrate and validate the capabilities of the model.