A detailed investigation of block dynamic sliding by the discontinuous deformation analysis

Abstract

An extensive examination of the discontinuous deformation analysis (DDA) in block dynamic sliding modeling is carried out in this paper. Theoretical solutions for a single block sliding on an arbitrarily inclined plane by applying the horizontal/vertical seismic loadings to the sliding block as acceleration time histories or to the base as constraint displacement time histories are derived. As compared with the theoretical solutions, for a single block sliding, the DDA predicts the sliding displacements and block interaction forces accurately under various base incline angles and friction angles under both the harmonic loadings and a real seismic loading. The vertical seismic component may influence the block sliding displacements to different extent, and the DDA can capture these phenomena successfully and give accurate results. For the calculation of the single block relative sliding, both the theoretical and the DDA solutions indicate that applying the seismic accelerations as constraint displacement time histories (derived by integrating the seismic accelerations twice) to the base is equivalent to applying the seismic accelerations as volume forces to the sliding block in the opposite directions. The DDA modeling also demonstrates that this conclusion still stands for the case of multi-block sliding.