  The presence of desiccation cracks in soils can significantly alter their
mechanical and hydrological properties. In many circumstances, desiccation
cracking in soils can cause significant damage to earthen or soil supported
structures. For example, desiccation cracks can act as the preference path way
for water flow, which can facilitate seepage flow causing internal erosion
inside earth structures. Desiccation cracks can also trigger slope failures and
landslides. Therefore, developing a computational procedure to predict
desiccation cracking behaviour in soils is vital for dealing with key issues
relevant to a range of applications in geotechnical and geo-environment
engineering. In this paper, the smoothed particle hydrodynamics (SPH) method
will be extended for the first time to simulate shrinkage-induced soil
cracking. The main objective of this work is to examine the performance of the
proposed numerical approach in simulating the strong discontinuity in material
behaviour and to learn about the crack formation in soils, looking at the
effects of soil thickness on the cracking patterns. Results show that the SPH
is a promising numerical approach for simulating crack formation in soils
