ABSTRACT

ABSTRACT: The Displacement Discontinuity method has been widely used in geomechanics because it accurately captures the behavior of fractures within a rock mass by explicitly accounting for discontinuities. Unfortunately, boundary element techniques require the interactions between all pairs of elements to be evaluated and traditional approaches to the Displacement Discontinuity method are computationally expensive for large problem sizes.

Approximate summation techniques, such as the Fast Multipole Method (FMM), calculate the interactions between N entities in time proportional to N. We have implemented a modified Fast Multipole approach which performs the necessary calculations in optimal time and with reduced memory usage. Furthermore, the FMM introduces parameters which can be selected to give the desired trade-off between efficiency and accuracy. The FMM approach permits much larger problems to be solved using desktop computers, opening up a range of applications. We present results demonstrating the speed of the code and several test cases involving rock fracture in compression.

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