Kinetic Energy Dissipation and Convergence Criterion of Discontinuous Deformations Analysis (DDA) for Geotechnical Engineering

The discontinuous deformation analysis (DDA) is a numerical method for modeling discontinuous deformation behaviour of jointed rocks. In this paper, two basic problems are discussed related to kinetic energy dissipation and the convergence criterion for the DDA method when it is applied to geotechnical engineering. In view of the fact that the deformation and progressive failure can be treated as a quasi-static process with low kinetic energy dissipation rates, this paper introduces a viscous damping component to absorb discrete blocks’ kinetic energy, establishes the global equations of motion of the discrete block system that take damping effects into account, investigates the energy dissipation mechanism when solving a static or quasi-static problem, and defines the convergence criteria of displacement, kinetic energy and unbalanced force for DDA solutions when the system arrives at a stable state.