Second-order cone programming formulation for consolidation analysis of saturated porous media

In this paper, the incremental problem for consolidation analysis of elastoplastic saturated porous media is formulated and solved using second-order cone programming. This is achieved by the application of the Hellinger-Reissner variational theorem, which casts the governing equations of Biot's consolidation theory as a min---max optimisation problem. The min---max problem is then discretised using the finite element method and converted into a standard second-order cone programming problem that can be solved efficiently using modern optimisation algorithms (such as the primal-dual interior-point method). The proposed computational formulation is verified against a number of benchmark examples and also applied to simulate the construction of a road embankment on soft clay.