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.

The numerical implementation of a recently developed thermomechanical constitutive model for fine-grained soils based on hyperelasticity-hyperplasticity theory (Golchin et al. 2020), is presented. A new unconventional implicit stress return mapping algorithm, compatible with elasticity derived from Gibbs (complementary) energy potential, in strain invariant space, is designed and the consistent tangent operator for use in boundary value problems (such as in the finite element method) is derived. It is shown that the rate of convergence of the stress integration algorithm is quadratic. The numerical results are in good agreement with available data from thermomechanical element tests found in literature.

This paper presents a new Modified Cam Clay (MCC) type yield function, that is designed for robust and efficient use with implicit stress integration algorithms. The proposed yield function attains non-elliptical (e.g. tear and bullet) shapes, as well as the typical elliptical shape of the MCC model. Like that of MCC, and unlike most other yield functions with non-elliptical shapes available in literature, it is non-singular and unique throughout stress space. The experimental yielding stresses of a wide range of geomaterials have been accurately simulated using the yield surface. The yield function can be used in constitutive models based on classical elasto-plasticity theory.