Unconfined seepage analysis in earth dams using smoothed fixed grid finite element method |
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| Authors: | Farhang Daneshmand |
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| Institution: | Mechanical Engineering Department, School of Engineering, Shiraz University, Shiraz 71348‐51154, IranCurrent address: Currently Visiting Professor at the Department of Mechanical Engineering, McGill University, 817 Sherbrooke Street W., Montreal, Québec, Canada H3A 2K6. |
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| Abstract: | One major difficulty in seepage analyses is finding the position of phreatic surface which is unknown at the beginning of solution and must be determined in an iterative process. The objective of the present study is to develop a novel non‐boundary‐fitted mesh finite‐element method capable of solving the unconfined seepage problem in domains with arbitrary geometry and continuously varied permeability. A new non‐boundary‐fitted finite element method named as smoothed fixed grid finite element method (SFGFEM) is used to simplify the solution of variable domain problem of unconfined seepage. The gradient smoothing technique, in which the area integrals are transformed into the line integrals around edges of smoothing cells, is used to obtain the element matrices. The solution process starts with an initial guess for the unknown boundary and SFGFEM is used to approximate the field variable. The boundary shape is then modified to eventually satisfy nonlinear boundary condition in an iterative process. Some numerical examples are solved to evaluate the applicability of the proposed method and the results are compared with those available in the literature. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. |
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| Keywords: | smoothed fixed grid finite element method unconfined seepage variable domain problems non‐boundary‐fitted meshes inhomogeneous earth dams |
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