Implementation of a Stress-dependent Strength Material Model in PLAXIS 3D

To perform tests on bucket foundations, full-scale testing is rarely used since it is rather expensive. Instead small-scale testing is done to examine the static and dynamic behaviour of such structures. In the laboratory at Aalborg University, small-scale testing of offshore support structures can be performed in a pressure tank, where a pressure can be applied in order to simulate deep water situations. Since the test set-up is downscaled 15 to 30 times compared to real-life structures, stresses and strains will be downscaled too. For soils, normally a Mohr-Coulomb failure criterion is used, and in the region of small stresses, a non-linear behaviour is observed - unlike the linear behaviour normally assumed in Mohr-Coulomb. To better model this non-linearity, a stress-dependent model for the strength of the soil material is sought to be implemented in PLAXIS 3D through FORTRAN to improve the computational accuracy of small-scale tests.