[Back]

R. Poisel, A. Preh:
"Modifications of PFC3D for rock mass fall modeling";
Talk: 1st International FLAC/DEM Symposium, Minneapolis, Minnesota; 2008-08-25 - 2008-08-27; in: "Continuum and Distinct Elemt Numerical Modeling in Geo-Engineering - 2008", P. Cundall, R. Hart, C. Detournay (ed.); Itasca Consulting Group, Inc., (2008), ISBN: 9780976757719; 29 - 38.

Rockfalls are modeled as the movements of single rock blocks over a surface or as the movement of a viscous mass over a surface (e.g. DAN). In reality a mass of discrete, inte-racting rock blocks is moving downslope. Thus the program PFC3D (Itasca 2005) based on the Distinct Element Method was modified in order to model rock mass falls realistically in 3 dimensions based on physical relations. According to observations in nature, several kinds of movements of the rock blocks (Broilli 1974) have to be distinguished during the computation (Bozzolo 1987): free falling, bouncing, rolling and sliding. In order to achieve an appropriate simulation of these different kinds of movements by PFC, some modifications using the implemented programming language (FISH) were necessary. The application of this method is demonstrated with the examples Punta Thurwieser (Italy) and Frank Slide (Canada).