The engineer designing such soil structures as embankments, dams, or building foundations should be able to predict the safety of these against collapse or excessive deformation under various loading conditions which are deemed possible. On occasion, he may have to apply his predictive knowledge to events in natural soil or rock outcrops, subject perhaps to new, man-made conditions. Typical of this is the disastrous collapse of the mountain (Mount Toc) bounding the Vajont reservoir which occurred on 9 October 1963 in Italy (Müller 1965). Figure 1.1 shows both a sketch indicating the extent of the failure and a diagram indicating the cross section of the encountered ground movement. <...>

It is well known that numerical methods play a very important role in geotechnical engineering and in a related activity called “computational geotechnics”. The area that is covered by computational geotechnics is growing, in particular that which relates to the multiphase nature of geomaterials. This book is the second volume of Computational Modeling of Multiphase Geomaterials that was published in 2012 and provides recent progress in this area, i.e., the basic concept of the air–water–soil mixture, cyclic constitutive models, anisotropic models, non-coaxial models, gradient models, strain localization including compaction bands, dynamic strain localization, and the instability of unsaturated soils.

It has been evident for several years that a summary of where we came from, where we are, and where we are going with computer-oriented research was not only desirable but necessary. The application of computers by earth scientists is numerous and the methods have proved of value in problem solving as well as data processing. Many methods unknown or unavailable just a few years ago now are used routinely. An overall appraisal of the methods at this time is deemed more than appropriate. <...>

Proceedings of the 14th international conference of international association for computer methods and recent advances in geomechanics, Kyoto, Japan, 22–25 september 2014

Over the last half a century, constitutive models for geomaterials and numerical analysis methods have been well developed. Nowadays, numerical methods play a very important role in Geotechnical Engineering. The first pioneering conference was held at Waterways Experiment Station, Vicksburg, Mississippi, USA in 1972 under the leadership of Prof. C.S. Desai. Then, subsequent conferences were held in Blacksburg (USA) – 1976, Aachen (Germany) – 1979, Edmonton (Canada) – 1982, Nagoya (Japan) – 1985, Innsbruck (Austria) – 1988, Cairns (Australia) – 1991, Morgantown (USA) – 1994, Wuhan (China) – 1997, Tucson (USA) – 2001, Torino (Italy) – 2005, and Goa (India) – 2008. Now the conference is organized by IACMAG every three years. The last one, the 13th International Conference on Computer Methods and Advances in Geomechanics, was held in Melbourne, Australia in 2011. The 14th conference, here in Kyoto, was accepted at the Melbourne conference in 2011. This conference series is the main activity of the International Association for Computer Methods and Advances in Geomechanics founded in 70’s by Prof. C.S. Desai of the University of Arizona; the present president of IACMAG is Prof. J. Carter of the University of Newcastle. <...>