1,023 research outputs found
QuaRRi: a new methodology for rock-fall risk analysis and management in quarry exploitation
Rockfall is one of the most critical geological events that can affect quarrying activities. Nevertheless, few tools are currently available to help designers and managers correctly define the risk conditions and quantify the advantages, in terms of workers' safety and quarry management, that can be obtained using suitable prevention devices. For this reason it is necessary to evaluate the various parameters that are involved, and to define the most important and which have the greatest influence on rock-fall phenomena, taking into account the Prevention through Design approach. A risk evaluation systemwhich is able to support decision makers in the critical rockfall risk assessment phase, and offer decision makers the updated information that is necessary for a continuous and dynamic operation design during exploitation activities is here presented and discusse
Orthogonal polynomials in badly shaped polygonal elements for the Virtual Element Method
In this paper we propose a modified construction for the polynomial basis on polygons used in the Virtual
Element Method (VEM). This construction is alternative to the usual monomial basis used in the classical
construction of the VEM and is designed in order to improve numerical stability. For badly shaped elements the
construction of the projection matrices required for assembling the local coefficients of the linear system within
the VEM discretization of Partial Differential Equations can result very ill conditioned. The proposed approach
can be easily implemented within an existing VEM code in order to reduce the possible ill conditioning of the
elemental projection matrices. Numerical results applied to an hydro-geological flow simulation that often
produces very badly shaped elements show a clear improvement of the quality of the numerical solution,
confirming the viability of the approach. The method can be conveniently combined with a classical
implementation of the VEM and applied element-wise, thus requiring a rather moderate additional numerical
cost
A hybrid mortar virtual element method for discrete fracture network simulations
The most challenging issue in performing underground flow simulations in Discrete Fracture Networks (DFN), is to effectively tackle the geometrical difficulties of the problem. In this work we put forward a new application of the Virtual Element Method combined with the Mortar method for domain decomposition: we exploit the flexibility of the VEM in handling polygonal meshes in order to easily construct meshes conforming to the traces on each fracture, and we resort to the mortar approach in order to ``weakly'' impose continuity of the solution on intersecting fractures. The resulting method replaces the need for matching grids between fractures, so that the meshing process can be performed independently for each fracture. Numerical results show optimal convergence and robustness in handling very complex geometries
Hybrid mimetic finite-difference and virtual element formulation for coupled poromechanics
We present a hybrid mimetic finite-difference and virtual element formulation
for coupled single-phase poromechanics on unstructured meshes. The key
advantage of the scheme is that it is convergent on complex meshes containing
highly distorted cells with arbitrary shapes. We use a local pressure-jump
stabilization method based on unstructured macro-elements to prevent the
development of spurious pressure modes in incompressible problems approaching
undrained conditions. A scalable linear solution strategy is obtained using a
block-triangular preconditioner designed specifically for the saddle-point
systems arising from the proposed discretization. The accuracy and efficiency
of our approach are demonstrated numerically on two-dimensional benchmark
problems.Comment: 25 pages, 17 figure
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