Finding Displacement And Stress Distributions On A Fault Plane

Abstract

Applying the boundary element method (BEM) for studying the displacement caused by the movements of a shear or tensile fault is proposed. Different from other similar researches (e.g. [l]), the information theory [2] is additionally introduced for finding the displacement and stress discontinuities on a fault plane from the displacements due to these discontinuities. A residual in terms of actual and predicted displacements is equated and minimized and this predicted displacement is provided by a BEM model. The displacement and stress discontinuities are then obtained by the minimization of the residual. The Akaike Information Criterion (AIC) [2] is applied for aiding the searching of best simulation of those displacement and stress distributions. Validation of the current BEM model by an example is presented. Another example is used for illustrating the proposed algorithm. It demonstrates that the works of exploring the displacement behavior of a shear or tensile fault is largely reduced.