The paper gives an overview of Material Point Method and shows its evolution over the last 25 years. The Material Point Method developments followed a logical order. The article aims at identifying this order and show not only the current state of the art, but explain the drivers behind the developments and identify what is currently still missing. The paper explores modern implementations of both explicit and implicit Material Point Method. It concentrates mainly on uses of the method in engineering, but also gives a short overview of Material Point Method application in computer graphics and animation. Furthermore, the article gives overview of errors in the material point method algorithms, as well as identify gaps in knowledge, filling which would hopefully lead to a much more efficient and accurate Material Point Method. The paper also briefly discusses algorithms related to contact and boundaries, coupling the Material Point Method with other numerical methods and modeling of fractures. It also gives an overview of modeling of multi-phase continua with Material Point Method. The paper closes with numerical examples, aiming at showing the capabilities of Material Point Method in advanced simulations. Those include landslide modeling, multiphysics simulation of shaped charge explosion and simulations of granular material flow out of a silo undergoing changes from continuous to discontinuous and back to continuous behavior. The paper uniquely illustrates many of the developments not only with figures but also with videos, giving the whole extend of simulation instead of just a timestamped image.

Piles were constructed inside historic brick barrel vaults during the London Bridge Station Redevelopment. In order to ensure safe operation of the tracks above, movements of the vaults were monitored regularly by total stations. Concurrently, two distributed sensing technologies, fibre optic cables and laser scanners, were used to investigate the vault response to settlements. This paper discusses the monitoring data retrieved from these ‘point’ and ‘distributed’ sensing technologies and evaluates their use in structural assessment. The total station data are examined first. It is characterized by high precision and limited spatial coverage due to the use of optical targets. As a result, the total station data are useful for threshold detection but do not provide a detailed understanding of structural response or damage. In contrast, by utilizing distributed fibre optic sensors based on Brillouin optical domain reflectometry, the strain development in the structure during piling is quantified. The location and width of resulting crack openings are also determined, providing useful indicators for damage evaluation. The comparison of point clouds from laser scanners obtained at different stages of pile construction further expands the spatial coverage by detecting global movement of the structure on all visible surfaces. Using these data, the two hinge-response mechanism of the vault is revealed. The rich distributed data enable the calibration of the 2D mechanism and the finite element models, elucidating the contribution of arch stiffness, arch and backfill interaction, potential lateral movements and inter-ring sliding to the response.

This paper presents a recent case study of monitoring the effects of piling on an adjacent old masonry vault in London. The monitoring scheme consists of 3 independent instrumentation sets that provide different types of information: (a) discrete total station point targets, (b) linear distributed fibre optic cable sensors and (c) surface distributed laser scanners. The availability of these sensors is able to shed some light on the actual response of the masonry structure through precise displacements and high-Accuracy localised strains. The collected monitoring data show the location of cracks and provide indications for their opening magnitude. Relevant numerical analyses have also been conducted using (a) limit analysis mechanisms and (b) finite element deformation analysis which confirmed the observed field deformation mechanism and the presence of cracks within the structure. It is shown that such innovative sensing approaches can provide valuable detailed information about the real behaviour of structures that were not available before.