An Enhanced Discrete Element Modeling Method Considering Spatiotemporal Correlations for Investigating Deformations and Failures of Jointed Rock Slopes

Abstract

The discrete element method (DEM) is commonly employed to analyze the deformations and failures of jointed rock slopes. However, when the iterative calculation process of the DEM modeling should be terminated is still unclear. To solve the above problem, in this paper, a discrete element modeling method based on the energy correlation coefficient is proposed to determine when the iterative calculation process could be terminated, and then applied the proposed method to analyze the deformations and failures of jointed rock slopes. Compared with the existing discrete element modeling method based on the displacement variation coefficient, the proposed method based on the energy correlation coefficient is much more applicable for jointed rock slopes. The main advantage of the proposed method is that there is no need to determine the position of the potential sliding surface, and the displacements of all blocks are no longer counted as statistics, but the spatiotemporal correlations between all blocks are considered. The effectiveness of the proposed method is verified by comparing with the existing method based on the displacement variation coefficient for an abbreviated jointed rock slope. Moreover, the proposed method is successfully applied to analyze a real-world jointed rock slope without an obvious potential sliding surface in which the existing method cannot work.