Determination of volume and centroid of irregular blocks by a simplex integration approach for use in discontinuous numerical methods

Abstract

Conventional integration techniques employed in continuous numerical methods can only be applied to regular blocks such as tetrahedrons or cubes. Therefore using such methods to compute the volume and centroid of blocks restricts the application of discontinuous numerical methods to the analysis of blocky systems. Subdividing a block into sub-blocks may solve this problem, but an algorithm which can be applied to blocks of different shapes has not been introduced. A new procedure for computing the volume and centroid of an arbitrarily shaped block based on area calculation using two-dimensional simplex integration and formulations of three-dimensional simplex integration developed by Shi is introduced in this paper. The new algorithm is easy to program and can be used instead of the complicated and time-consuming mesh generation approach. The proposed algorithm was programmed using VC + + and is verified using an illustrative example.

Keywords:

• irregular blocks
• block volume
• block centroid
• simplex integration
• oriented area