A practical parallel preprocessing strategy for 3D numerical manifold method

Over the past three decades, the numerical manifold method (NMM) has attracted many researchers from geotechnical community because it unifies the solutions of continuous and discontinuous problems in the same framework. However, due to the lack of ready-made preprocessing tools, the development of three dimensional NMM (3DNMM) is still limited. A practical strategy to generate the discretized models for a 3DNMM analysis is proposed. In the proposed strategy, regular hexahedral meshes are uniformly deployed to construct the mathematical cover system. The physical meshes including the joints, material interfaces, and problem domain boundaries are adopted to cut the mathematical cover system into physical cover system and manifold elements (MEs). To improve the efficiency of the proposed strategy, the Intel threading building blocks (TBB) parallel library for CPU paralleling is adopted. Several typical examples are adopted to validate the proposed strategy. The results show that the proposed strategy can effectively generate the discretized 3D models of some geotechnical problems for 3DNMM calculations. The proposed strategy deserves a further investigation.