ABSTRACT
Recently, researchers have realized the importance of the microstructure of rock when studying the macroscopic mechanical behaviors. For example, Nasseri and Mohanty (2008) report that the fracture toughness of rock materials cannot be assigned a unique value without cognizance of their microstructure characteristics. The experimental methods, e.g., the ultra-bright synchrotron radiation (SR)-CT system (Ichikawa et al, 2001), the scanning electron microscope (SEM) (Wang et al, 2005) and laboratory-based micro X-ray CT (50-500 um) (Flemming, 2007), are used to study the micro-cracking and propagation and time-dependent fracturing behavior of rock and concrete materials. However, the experimental methods are limited by the detection conditions, e.g. CT and SEM are only applicable at low loading rates, it became a barrier of performing further study on the dynamic response on rock materials. Fortunately, numerical methods provide extremely powerful tools for this kind of study. For example, the bondedparticle model (BPM) (Potyondy,2007) and FEM with a Weibull distribution model (Tang and Kaiser, 1998) are successfully used in micromechanics study of rock materials. However, in most cases microscopic modeling has very high requirement on the computational capacity of the numerical code and a parallel version is necessary. In this paper, we will discuss the parallel implementation of the Distinct Lattice Spring Model (DLSM) which is a microstructure based method proposed by Zhao et al (2009) and have been used to study the dynamic response of rock materials at microscopic scale (Zhao and Zhao, 2009).
