Modelling groundwater pressure and thermal loading in three-dimensional discontinuous deformation analysis

Abstract

The Discontinuous Deformation Analysis (DDA) is a powerful numerical method for the analysis of discontinuous rock mass behaviour. In this paper, three-dimensional (3-D) DDA is extended to allow the consideration of groundwater pressure and thermal loading. A general model of water pressure distribution on the surfaces of rock blocks is established. The water pressure submatrices and thermal loading submatrices are derived by minimizing the total potential energy and added to the global matrices. These extensions to 3-D DDA have been implemented into a 3-D DDA computer program. Three test cases given show that the 3-D DDA results are reasonable.