The Earthquake Engineering Online Archive

DDA for Windows: discontinuous deformation analysis for the Windows PC environment

MacLaughlin, Mary M.; Sitar, Nicholas

UCB/GT-95-04, University of California, Berkeley, Geotechnical Engineering, Manual for software developed under Grant No. DACW39-93-K-0053 from the U.S. Army Engineer Waterways Experiment Station, Vicksburg, Mississippi., 1995-10, PDF (1 MB)

UC Berkeley Version 1.1. Description and tutorial for Discontinuous Deformation Analysis, DDA, software. DDA is a numerical method developed to model the behavior of discontinuous media (Shi, 1993). DDA models a discontinuous material as a system of individual deformable blocks which move independently and interact without penetrating one another. Its formulation is based on a dynamic equilibrium which considers the kinematics of individual blocks as well as friction along the block interfaces. The transient formulation of the problem, which is based on minimization of potential energy, makes it possible to investigate how the block movements will progress with time.

Available online: http://library.eerc.berkeley.edu/documents/GEOTECH/UCB-GT-95-04.pdf