Modeling rock failure using the numerical manifold method followed by the discontinuous deformation analysis

A complete rock failure process usually involvesopening/sliding of preexisting discontinuities as well as fracturing in intact rock bridges to form persistent failure surfaces and subsequent motions of the generated rock blocksThe recently developed numerical manifold method(NMM)has potential for modelling such a complete failure processHowever,the NMM suffers one limitation,i.e.,unexpectedmaterial domain area change occurs in rotation modellingThis problem can not be easily solved because the rigidbody rotation is not represented explicitly in the NMM.Thediscontinuous deformation analysis(DDA) is specially developed for modelling discrete block systems.The rotationinduced material area change in the DDA modelling canbe avoided conveniently because the rigid body rotation isrepresented in an explicit form.In this paper,a transitiontechnique is proposed and implemented to convert a NMMmodelling to a DDA modelling so as to simulate a completerock failure process entirely by means of the two methods,in which the NMM is adopted to model the early fracturingas well as the transition from continua to discontinua,whilethe DDA is adopted to model the subsequent motion of thegenerated rock blocks.Such a numerical approach also improves the simulation efficiency greatly as compared with acomplete NMM modelling approach.The fracturing of arock slab with pre-existing non-persistent joints located ona slope crest and the induced rockfall process are simulated.The validity of the modelling transition from the NMM tothe DDA is verified and the applicability of the proposed numerical approach is investigated.