Modeling viscoelastic deformation of the earth due to surface loading by commercial finite element package - ABAQUS

Abstract

Wu (2004) developed a transformation scheme to model viscoelatic deformation due to glacial loading by commercial finite element package - ABAQUS. Benchmark tests confirmed that this method works extremely well on incompressible earth model. Bangtsson et. al. (2008), however, showed that the transformation scheme would lead to incorrect results if compressible material parameters are used. Their study implies that Wu’s method of stress transformation is inadequate to model the load induced deformation of a compressible earth by ABAQUS. In light of this, I carried out numerical experiments to test other plausible methods. In all tests I have done, it is found that the results do not converge through iterations, except at the elastic limit, in which results match the benchmark values. I will present the results of those numerical experiments and also discuss on the suspected reason of failure.