AbstractThe paper concerns the issue of progressive development of shear bands in drained and undrained porous media. The main focus is on the design of an overall numerical algorithm to solve the coupled set of non-linear FE-equations that arise from the embedded band approach. In particular, we are concerned with the proper numerical treatment of the condition for onset of localization in conjunction with ductile material failure, whereby failure occurs after significant amount of plastic deformation. In order to arrive at the proper design of the algorithm, we resort to a staggering between the continuous (global) problem and the discontinuous (element) problems. At the application to the numerical examples, the algorithm is shown to work well in terms its ability to capture onset of localization as well as post-localized behavior in conjunction with ductile material failure characteristics.