Using the Finite Element Method has now become common practice in geotechnical engineering. Software solutions available on the market allow taking into account complex geometries, boundary conditions and loadings and provide convenient tools to get a clear understanding of various aspects of the results. Nevertheless, the Mohr-Coulomb model is still used in a large majority of applications, although it is not necessarily realistic for service state analysis. To overcome this difficulty, the FEM user should spend more energy in the understanding of the geomaterials behaviour. IFSTTAR aims to help in this task by conceiving a toolbox of constitutive laws, proposing the user a library of elastic laws, plasticity and hardening criteria. The engineer will construct a new constitutive law, adapted to the project context and geomaterials types, without having to write the corresponding computer code. The article presents the concept of the toolbox implemented in the FEM code CESAR. The approach is illustrated by two relatively simple examples. In the first one, the Hardening Soil model (HSM) is used to model a retaining structure. The second one combines the Mohr-Coulomb criterion with a non-linear elasticity for the analysis of a piled raft foundation.
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