Recent Advances in Numerical Modelling for Soil and Soil-Structure Interactions

All civil structures are built on soils; and the failure of foundation soil due to reduction of shear strength under static/cyclic load or soil-structure interaction often leads to catastrophic disasters. Therefore, there have been many efforts to investigate the mechanical behaviour of soil and its effect on the stability of a structure. The major challenge in geotechnical and structural engineering is that the mechanical behaviour of soil is very complicated due to the interactions between the soil grains and structural components. The element or large-scale testing for soil and structural component to replicate the field condition is often expensive and requires sophisticated system. Therefore, more and more researchers have recently moved into the computational and numerical modelling of soil and structure in order to investigate their mechanical responses due to external loads.

This Research Topic will focus on developing or proposing numerical approaches to provide better understanding of soil behaviour and soil-structure interaction, which will lead to a safer and economical design of civil structures. Additionally, it will also help to develop better computational techniques which can replicate the laboratory or field conditions. Furthermore, one of the main reasons for underestimating the failure potential of a structure is the inability of capture the interactions between the soil and the structure. Some recent computational approaches such as discrete element method or coupled finite and discrete element method have been adopted to tackle that problem. Finally, this topic will aim to explore the micro-structure of soil and its effect on the overall behaviour by using one of the recent numerical approaches.

The scope of this Research Topic is to examine various numerical modelling approaches which has been attracting the attention of researchers in geotechnical and structural engineering.

It will cover a diverse range of research areas (to name some, soil and structure response due static/cyclic load, dynamic analysis, earthquake engineering, pavement, etc.)

So, we would like to invite original submissions (research report, case study or conceptual analysis) covering the recent developments in computational modelling in any aspect of geotechnical and structural engineering. Here are the potential topics for this Research Topic

• Numerical modelling of soil

• Soil-structure interaction

• Engineering design related to soil-structure interaction such as footing, slope, retaining structures

• Innovation in geotechnical structures

• Pavement engineering

• Earthquake engineering

• Constitutive modelling