Description

• The sand plasticity model PM4Sand was developed for geotechnical earthquake engineering applications by Professors Ross W. Boulanger (homepage) and Katerina Ziotopoulou (homepage) at the University of California at Davis.
• PM4Sand is a stress-ratio controlled, critical state-based, bounding surface plasticity model for sand (and other purely nonplastic granular soils) that has been implemented as a user-defined dynamic link library for use with the program FLAC and FLAC2D by Itasca. The model was developed and implemented to approximate stress-strain responses of specific importance to geotechnical earthquake engineering and liquefaction problems.
• The companion model, PM4Silt (homepage), is available for modeling saturated, low-plasticity silts and clays that exhibit stress-history normalized behaviors.

Keywords

• effective stress
• liquefaction
• plastic
• pore pressure
• seismic loading

References

Manual: Boulanger, R. W., and Ziotopoulou, K. (2023). “PM4Sand (Version 3.3): A sand plasticity model for earthquake engineering applications.” Report No. UCD/CGM-23/01, Center for Geotechnical Modeling, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, University of California, Davis, CA, March, 112 pp. [pdf available here]