Desiccation cracking of soil-like materials is a common phenomenon in
natural dry environment, however, it remains a challenge to model and
simulate complicated multi-physical processes inside the porous
structure. With the goal of tracking such physical evolution accurately,
we propose an MPM based method to simulate volumetric shrinkage and
crack during moisture diffusion. At the physical level, we introduce
Richards equations to evolve the dynamic moisture field to model
evaporation and diffusion in unsaturated soils, with which a
elastoplastic model is established to simulate strength changes and
volumetric shrinkage via a novel saturation-based hardening strategy
during plastic treatment. At the algorithmic level, we develop an
MPM-fashion numerical solver for the proposed physical model and achieve
stable yet efficient simulation towards delicate deformation and
fracture. At the geometric level, we propose a correlating stretching
criteria and a saturation-aware extrapolation scheme to extend existing
surface reconstruction for MPM, producing visual compelling soil
appearance. Finally, we manifest realistic simulation results based on
the proposed method with several challenging scenarios, which
demonstrates usability and efficiency of our method.