Shear band localization phenomena in saturated or non-saturated soils initiate, for example, the well-known slope failure problem of geotechnical engineering. The mechanical description of this type of phenomena basically falls into the category of fluid-saturated granular elasto-plastic materials, which can be described within a macroscopic approach by use of the Theory of Porous Media (TPM). In the present contribution, the TPM formulation of the porous solid skeleton material is extended by micropolar degrees of freedom in the sense of the Cosserat brothers. This procedure, in contrast to the usual continuum mechanical approach to the TPM, allows for the determination of the local average grain rotations. When shear banding occurs, micropolarity furthermore yields a regularization effect on the solution of the set of governing differential equations both in the case of saturated and non-saturated soils. In the saturated case, the inclusion of the pore-fluid viscosity alone is also appropriate to regularize the localization problem.     «

Shear band localization phenomena in saturated or non-saturated soils initiate, for example, the well-known slope failure problem of geotechnical engineering. The mechanical description of this type of phenomena basically falls into the category of fluid-saturated granular elasto-plastic materials, which can be described within a macroscopic approach by use of the Theory of Porous Media (TPM). In the present contribution, the TPM formulation of the porous solid skeleton material is extended by m...     »