Application of discontinuous deformation analysis on stability analysis of slopes and underground power houses

Abstract

Continuous computation and limit equilibrium computation are the two independent computations for practical rock engineering. For global stability analysis, limit equilibrium is still the fundamental method. For any numerical method, reaching limit equilibrium requires large displacements, discontinuous contacts, precise friction law, multistep computation and stabilised time-step dynamic computation. Therefore three convergences are unavoidable: convergence of equilibrium equations, convergence of open-close iterations for contacts and convergence of the contact forces of dynamic computations. This paper utilises mainly two dimensional discontinuous deformation analysis (DDA) and an available simple version of three dimensional DDA. The applications show DDA has the ability to reach the limit equilibrium of block systems.

Keywords:

• DDA
• rock engineering
• stability