Investigating the influence of rock-shape on rockfall dynamics using 3-D DDA

Rockfall is one of the most frequent, major hazards in mountainous areas and along engineered slopes worldwide. Accurate estimation of rockfall dynamics is essential for rockfall risk assessment, design and performance evaluation of preventive structures. Although many rockfall simulation codes have been developed, a major variable involved in rockfalls, the rock-shape, which strongly affects the rockfall events, is still poorly considered. Three dimensional discontinuous deformation analysis (3-D DDA) is an effective and helpful tool on rockfall analysis which can explicitly account for rock-shape. In this paper, a practical 3-D DDA code is demonstrated to be capable of simulating free falling, rolling, sliding, and bouncing with high accuracy, which indicates the implemented code is capable of providing reliable rockfall analysis. Rockfall simulations are performed on both idealized incline planes as well as bin-planar slopes. Particle shape index has been induced to investigate the influence of rock-shape after impacts occurred. The rockfall movement behaviors: lateral dispersion and jump height are used to obtain the influence of rock-shape. The analysis provides a more detail description of rock masses and useful information on consideration of rock-shape in rockfall simulation.