Immersed isogeometric Boundary Elements: A user friendly method for the 3-D elasto-plastic simulation of underground excavations

The immersed isogeometric Boundary Element Method is presented and applied to the simulation of underground excavations. Nonuniform rational B-splines (NURBS) are used for the accurate definition of complex geometries with few parameters. Immersed technology is applied to automatically generate cell meshes. This allows heterogeneous and anisotropic ground conditions as well as nonlinear material behaviour to be considered. On a practical example the user friendliness and accuracy is demonstrated.