Abstract: For the foundation, slope and backfill supported by retaining wall, which consist of the over-consolidation clay, dense sand or non-associated plasticity material, the appearance of strain localization during the gradual process of the failure and instability of these geotechnical structures will lead to the change of the type of governing partial differential equation. Furthermore, this change results in non-unique and the mesh-dependence of solutions obtained by standard finite element method (FEM). In order to overcome these difficulties, on the basis of the strong discontinuity analysis (SDA), the embedded discontinuity finite element model is employed to investigate the failure processes of foundation, slope and backfill. Numerical examples show that this model can effectively simulate the post-failure processes of geotechnical structures and improve the objectivity of response with respect to the mesh size. The results also show that, this method can be taken as a beneficial supplement to traditional limit equilibrium method in stability analysis of slope and foundation.

Key words: failure process, strain localization, strong discontinuity analysis, assumed enhanced strain method, embedded discontinuity finite element model