Finite-element modeling of multibody contact and its application to active faults

Earthquakes have been recognized as resulting from a stick-slip frictional instability along the faults between deformable rocks. An arbitrarily-shaped contact element strategy, named the node-to-point contact element strategy, is proposed, applied with the static-explicit characters to handle the friction contact between deformable bodies with stick and finite frictional slip and extended here to simulate the active faults in the crust with a more general nonlinear friction law. An efficient contact search algorithm for contact problems among multiple small and finite deformation bodies is also introduced. Moreover, the efficiency of the parallel sparse solver for the nonlinear friction contact problem is investigated. Finally, a model for the plate movement in the north-east zone of Japan under gravitation is taken as an example to be analyzed with different friction behaviors. Copyright (C) 2002 John Wiley Sons, Ltd

A meshfree radial point interpolation method (RPIM) for three-dimensional solids

10.1007/s00466-005-0657-6Computational Mechanics366421-430CMME