An Effective Inverse Procedure for Identifying DEMParameters of Rock-Like Materials

This study aims to identify discrete element model parameters of rock-like materials. An inverse procedure is developed to determine the discrete element model parameters from experimental measurements. This involves the solution of an inverse problem through minimizing the misfit function which describes the error between numerical computation and experiment by an optimization procedure. In this procedure, the discrete element method is adopted as the numerical calculation method of the forward problem. The orthogonal experimental design is used for parameter sensitivity analysis. Besides, the approximation model with radial basis function is adopted instead of the actual calculation model to reduce the time of forward calculation. The ant-colony optimization algorithm is employed as the inverse operator. Therefore, the parameters of the discrete element model are optimized by this procedure. The three-point bending experiment with discrete element simulation is provided to verify the validity and accuracy of the inversion results. The results indicate that it can rapidly obtain the available and reliable model parameters just through a few sets of experimental data. As a result, this inverse procedure can be applied more widely to parameter identification of the discrete element model for brittle materials.