Abstract
A reliable estimation of surface fault displacements is a crucial for design and safety assessment of important facilities like nuclear power plants. It is necessary to develop a numerical method for the estimation. In this study, we develop a finite element method to which the following two functions are implemented: 1) a rigorously formulated joint elements of high order; and 2) a symplectic time integration of explicit scheme to properly conserve the energy of the fault. The finite element method is enhanced with parallel computing capability. We carry out verification of the developed method solving simple three-dimensional models of a fault embedded in a rock mass. It is shown the method is applicable to a model of one million degrees-of-freedom and the time to solution is sufficiently short.
