Copyright © 2012 Xi Chen and Kok Kwang Phoon. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

Two solution schemes are proposed and compared for large 3D soil consolidation problems with nonassociated plasticity. One solution scheme results in the nonsymmetric linear equations due to the Newton iteration, while the other leads to the symmetric linear systems due to the symmetrized stiffness strategies. To solve the resulting linear systems, the QMR and SQMR solver are employed in conjunction with nonsymmetric and symmetric MSSOR preconditioner, respectively. A simple footing example and a pile-group example are used to assess the performance of the two solution schemes. Numerical results disclose that compared to the Newton iterative scheme, the symmetric stiffness schemes combined with adequate acceleration strategy may lead to a significant reduction in total computer runtime as well as in memory requirement, indicating that the accelerated symmetric stiffness method has considerable potential to be exploited to solve very large problems.