In-Situ Stress And Topography in 3DEC

3DEC is commonly used to model rock masses close to the earth’s surface. In these situations, the in-situ vertical stress at each point can be calculated from the weight of overlying material. The horizontal stresses often are assumed to be some proportion of the vertical.

3DEC provides a command, insitu topo, to calculate these initial stresses for each zone. However, this calculation used to be so slow that is was not of practical use. With the latest update of 3DEC (Version 5.00.168 or above), this function has been sped up dramatically to make it useful once again.

The figure below shows vertical stress calculated using the insitu topo command for a model with almost 800,000 zones. The calculation takes a couple of minutes, depending on the speed of your computer. You can see the higher stresses under the mountains and the lower stresses under the valleys. The red circle indicates a geological unit with low density. The zones under this unit therefore have reduced stresses.

The insitu topo command also calculates the stresses on joints as shown in the figure.

Download example


Latest News
  • ITASCA Releases MassFlow version 9.0 ...
    Read More
  • Introducing IMAT (ITASCA Mining Analysis Toolbox): Transforming Mining Analysis Solutions ...
    Read More
  • 3DEC 9 Officially Released ITASCA announces the release of 3DEC v9, an advanced three-dimensional, hybrid discontinuum and continuum modeling...
    Read More

Upcoming Events
22 Apr
FLAC2D In-Person Introductory Course
Live in-person introductory training course. This 3-day course provides a general overview of FLAC2D and covers many basic concepts and... Read More
29 Apr
PFC In-Person Introductory Course
Live in-person introductory training course. This four-day course provides guidance in the use of the Itasca codes PFC2D and PFC3D to s... Read More
29 May
Getting Started with FLAC2D/FLAC3D
Objectives of the training: •Understand the FLAC2D/ FLAC3D numerical approach and the types ofproblems it can solve•Know how to manipul... Read More