Gertraud Medicus

Constitutive modelling is a core subject in the field of computational geotechnics, as the quality of
predictions made by finite element simulations depends on the quality of the constitutive model
used. For many students, constitutive modelling is perceived as an abstract and 'hard to grasp'
topic in engineering education. The aim of the project ’Animating Soil Models’ is to improve the
understanding of constitutive modelling through animations and interactive figures. Topics
visualised include yield surfaces, stress invariants, critical state soil mechanics and some related
models such as the Modified Cam Clay model and hypoplasticity. The visualisations are available
on the SoilModels.com platform under the open CC BY license, making them freely available as
educational resources. The animations certainly do not replace the study of equations,
calculations or reading books. However, they can facilitate the teaching and understanding of
concepts related to constitutive modelling.