Frictional contact for pile installation

Penetration problems in geomechanics are extremely difficult to model, because they usually involve large deformation, frictional contact and large variation of material stiffness. This paper proposes a number of strategies to deal with the computational challenges involved in modelling pile installation in geomechanics. In particular, an Arbitrary Lagrangian-Eulerian method is proposed to handle the large deformation and mesh distortion problem. A smooth discretisation of the contact surfaces is proposed to handle the vertex problems of the penetrating body. An automatic time stepping scheme is proposed to solve the nonlinear stiffness equation. The effectiveness of these numerical enhancements will then be demonstrated in the simulation of installation of displacement piles.