A novel particle-cell hybrid (PCH) method for geotechnical large deformation analysis

The Particle Finite Element Method (PFEM) and its variants, such as the Smoothed PFEM (SPFEM), have gained popularity for analysing geotechnical problems. However, the challenge of mass conservation often compromises the accuracy of numerical results across various applications. In this study, we introduce a novel strategy to address this issue by integrating the concept of material points into SPFEM, thereby establishing a Particle-Cell Hybrid (PCH) method. This approach retains the advantages of SPFEM while ensuring mass conservation. The core idea involves incorporating mass information for each particle during computations. Despite its simplicity, this treatment has proven to be robust and effective through a series of benchmarking tests. Additionally, numerical experiments demonstrate that the PCH method considerably reduces sensitivity to unphysical factors in the boundary identification technique employed within the PFEM framework. The proposed framework represents a significant advancement in the development of PFEM, and can be easily incorporated into other PFEM codes and software to improve their numerical accuracy.