ABSTRACT

Dynamic relaxation was also the basis of the early finite-difference ‘hydrocodes’ developed for modeling elasto-plastic material flow in the large deformation range (Wilkins 1964). The continuum code FLAC follows this line of development, attesting the capabilities of the explicit solution methods in soil and rock mechanics problems. A further advantage of explicit codes is that the same algorithm may be used for both static and dynamic analysis. The only difference is the choice of damping parameters and inertial masses, which may be scaled for optimal convergence in static analysis.