Three-dimensional discontinuous deformation analysis based on strain-rotation decomposition

The strain and local rotation at any material point in a deformable body can be descripted by the strain-rotation (S-R) decomposition theorem. This paper presents a three-dimensional dynamic deformation formulation based on the S-R decomposition. The three-dimensional dynamic analysis formulation is generic and can be easily implemented into numerical methods. By combining the new formulation with the discontinuous deformation analysis (DDA), a new method named SR-3D-DDA is developed. We further use several examples to demonstrate that the S-R based DDA can help effectively eliminate the nonphysical volume change exhibited by existing DDAs and improve the accuracy of the predictions.