Simulation of non-cohesive soil turning based on an SPH model

Soil turning is an infrastructure activity in the field of geotechnical engineering. In this study, we propose a new soil turning numerical model based on the Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH) method, in which an elastoplastic constitutive model is implemented. To validate the model, firstly, a landslide benchmark test is studied, the error of the maximum sliding distance is only 1.5 % compared to the experimental data. Next, a combined experimental numerical investigation on the soil turning process is carried out. We compare the experimental observations with the numerical modeling results and find that the numerical error of the peak height and the horizontal distance of the soil is about 2.56 % and 3.37 %, respectively, indicating that the proposed SPH model can reproduce the soil turning process accurately. The simulation results also demonstrate that: (1) When the turning speed is increased, the turning resistance does not change significantly but leads to a more sufficient mixing of the soil; (2) There exists a critical turning angle above which the resistance increase significantly associates with a larger angle; (3) Increasing the burying depth of the tool helps to improve the mixing effect; however, leads to larger resistance as well.