oa Numerical Study for Failure Behavior of Rock Masses Including Complex Free-surfaces Using a Particle Method

Failure of rock mass including complex free surfaces is of importance in many engineering and scientific fields. This paper applied an advanced discretization approach to simulate quasi-static failure of rock mass within a Hamiltonian particle method (HPM) framework. In HPM, a free surface is introduced in a simple way, just by removing or ignoring outer particles. This potential can be developed to discretize numerical models including complex free surfaces without the increment of time for pre-processing. In the present study, we developed the numerical simulator based on HPM with a staggered particle technique for simulating brittle failure and AE activities in rock mass with incorporating the elasto-plastic damage model. We, first, conducted uni-axial compressive tests for validating the effectiveness of our approach. Next, we adopted rectangular and circular disc specimens with a hole as complex free surface models. Our numerical results had good agreement with those from laboratory experiments. This suggests that HPM would be a method to simulate failure behavior of rock mass without time-consuming pre-processing.