Comparison of Solutions for Cavity Expansion in Cohesive Frictional Soils

This paper presents a comparison of the solutions for cavity expansion in cohesive frictional soils, which are modelled as elastic perfectly plastic materials obeying the Mohr Coulomb failure criterion. Vesic’s solutions were extended to the cavity expansions from a finite radius. A numerical procedure was proposed to compute the pressure expansion curve for cavity expansions using Hill’s incremental velocity approach. It is shown that the numerical results obtained from the proposed procedure are equivalent to the analytical solutions by Yu and Houlsby. The analytical solutions are also validated against finite difference analysis using the explicit Lagrangian calculation scheme.