Stability and efficiency studies in the numerical simulation of cone penetration in sand

This paper evaluates the effect of analysis parameter choices on the stability and efficiency of modelling cone penetration into sand. This very large deformation quasi-static boundary-value problem is modelled here using the arbitrary Lagrangian–Eulerian adaptive mesh technique available within Abaqus/Explicit. The sand response is captured using a hypoplastic constitutive model. It is demonstrated that many choices of analysis parameters lead to spurious results, some of which show clear instability, while other combinations show reasonable stability but over-estimation of the cone resistance. The accuracy of the numerical solution is shown through comparison against centrifuge experimental data for two different relative densities of the sand.