A new potential function for the calculation of contact forces in the combined finite-discrete element method文档.pdf

INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL FOR NUMERICAL AND ANALYTICAL METHODS IN GEOMECHANICS Int. J. Numer. Anal. Meth. Geomech. (2016) Published online in Wiley Online Library (). DOI: 10.1002/nag.2559 A new potential function for the calculation of contact forces in the combined finite–discrete element method C.Z. Yan1,2 and H. Zheng2,*,† 1State Key Laboratory of Geomechanics and Geotechnical Engineering, Institute of Rock and Soil Mechanics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Wuhan 430071, China 2Key Laboratory of Urban Security and Disaster Engineering (Beijing University of Technology), Ministry of Education, Beijing 100124, China SUMMARY Although the potential contact force proposed by Munjiza overcomes the difficulties inherent in the tradi- tional discrete element methods, the physical meaning of the potential is not clear and the contact force de- rived from the original potential function is strongly dependent on the mesh configuration. In this study, we redefine a potential function and propose a new contact force calculation method based on a unified stan- dard. Moreover, the new potential function retains all the advantages of the original potential function but has less mesh dependency. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley Sons, Ltd. Received 7 September 2015; Revised 18 June 2016; Accepted 5 July 2016 KEY WORDS: combined finite–discrete element method (FDEM); contact force; discrete element method (DEM); potential function 1. INTRODUCTION The rupture phenomenon of brittle rock has been a hot spot of experimental and theoretical studies. Many problems in rock mechanics and rock engineering are related to the rock fracture closely. Some knowledge of complex rock fracture has b