LAUSR

Abstract A plastic-dissipation-based mesh adaptive algorithm is first introduced into the upper-bound finite-element method to determine the stability of axisymmetric problems using an equivalent plane strain model. The failure loads for two geotechnical examples were presented in the form of dimensionless stability numbers. The refined meshes and power dissipations were also plotted to highlight evolutional characteristics of failure mechanisms. Comparisons are given to verify the effectiveness of the mesh adaptive strategy. The advantage of the present method lies in the improved accuracy of the upper-bound solution and the ability to provide failure patterns with greater clarity.