Yield design for porous media subjected to unconfined flow: construction of approximate pressure fields

Understand

We consider the stability of a porous medium submitted to a steady-state flow with free-boundary.

• Assuming some hypotheses, it is possible to implement the kinematic method by using an approximate pressure field bounding the true pressure field from below.
• We are interested in finding such approximate pressure fields and in proving that they bound the true pressure field from below without knowing the true pressure field.
• We use fields which are solutions of a problem with relaxed conditions with regard to the real problem.