Applications of Discontinuous Deformation Analysis (DDA) to Rock Engineering

Limit equilibrium is still the fundamental method for global stability analysis. Reaching limit equilibrium requires large displacements, discontinuous contacts, precise friction law, multi-step computation and stabilized time-step dynamic computation. Therefore three convergences are unavoidable: convergence of equilibrium equations, convergence of open-close iterations for contacts and convergence of the contact forces of dynamic computations. This paper focuses mainly on applications of two dimensional DDA. The applications show DDA has the ability to reach limit equilibrium of block systems. For slope stability analysis, this paper works on rock block toppling and loosening, where the block rotation is the main issue. For foundation stability analysis, this paper presents dam foundation damage computation, where the block sliding is a main issue.