Negative pore pressures existing in semi-saturated conditions provide a substantial ‘cohesion’ of the soil. This cohesion is of importance in the dynamic response of embankments and dams. The paper extends the formulation presented in part I to problems of semi-saturated behaviour with the assumption of free air ingress. An approximate reconstruction of the failure of the lower San Fernando dam during the 1971 earthquake is presented.

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SUMMARYIn this paper, a novel iterative coupling scheme is developed for solving coupled hydro‐mechanical problems using reproducing kernel particle method. The numerical scheme calls the fluid and the solid solvers sequentially and iteratively until convergent solutions are obtained. To overcome the numerical instability problem, a simple stabilization technique is developed and proved to be unconditionally stable through stability analysis. The accuracy and convergence of the proposed numerical scheme are demonstrated through extensive parametric studies of one‐dimensional and two‐dimensional consolidation simulations using fully saturated elastic medium as well as biaxial test using a fully nonlinear soil model. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

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