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In simulations of geotechnical engineering, interface elements are versatile tools and are widely used in the modeling of the relative displacements between soils and structures. To consider the case of a local failure adjacent to a soil-structure interaction region, a partial mesh refinement should be performed. In this study, a three-dimensional (3D) interface element with an arbitrary number of nodes is developed as a new technique to reduce the complexity and difficulty of managing the various scales between soil and structure. An asymmetric number of nodes is permissible on the two sliding surfaces. In this manner, soil and structure can be discretized independently, and the various-scale model is established conveniently and rapidly. The accuracy of the proposed method is demonstrated through numerical examples. The various-scale approach is employed in an elasto-plastic seismic damage analysis of a buried concrete drainage culvert of a nuclear power plant. The results indicate that by applying the proposed method, the number of elements decreased by 72.5%, and the computational efficiency improved by 59% with little influence on accuracy. The proposed method is powerful for local damage evolution analyses of both soil and structure and possesses great practical significance and the potential for further application, especially for nonlinear analysis of large-scale geotechnical engineering. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Estimating the cracking capacity of the face slab and recommending effective crack-control measures are important for the anti-seismic safety of concrete-faced rockfill dams (CFRDs). In this paper, two-dimensional analyses of CFRDs are performed to simulate the seismic cracking behavior of conventional reinforced concrete (RC) face slab and a type of composite face slab. The composite face slab is composed of a ductile fiber-reinforced cement-based composite (DFRCC) layer and an RC substrate. For this purpose, a co-axial rotating smeared crack model for concrete and DFRCC is coupled with the generalized plasticity model for the rockfill material, and then implemented in a finite element program. The results show that during strong earthquakes, an RC slab is more likely to develop a penetrating macro-crack in its thickness dimension. In contrast, the crack-controlling composite slab demonstrates excellent resistance to seismic cracking, and no penetrating macro-cracks are observed. Major harmful cracks that form in the concrete substrate are stopped by the DFRCC layer in composite slabs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]