Direct Approach to Treatment of Contact in Numerical Manifold Method

Abstract

The numerical manifold method (NMM) is suitable for the solution of both continuous and discontinuous problems in geotechnical engineering. In the conventional NMM, the contact between blocks is treated with the open-close iteration, which needs to fix or remove spurious springs between two blocks in contact and to assume properly the normal stiffness and the tangential stiffness (the penalty parameters). Unreasonable values of stiffness would result in numerical problems. To avoid the penalty parameters, contacts are treated in a direct way in which contact forces are primal variables. Numerical examples have confirmed the correctness and feasibility of the proposed procedure.