[CIG-SHORT] Kinematic faults vs dynamic faults and fault opening

[Brad Aagaard]

Ruel Jerry,

Attached are two examples that I created that illustrate imposing shear 
dislocations via either prescribed slip (kinematic fault) or frictional 
sliding (dynamic fault). I examined the stresses and they look correct 
with symmetry or asymmetry in the appropriate components. You can run 
these examples by extracting the tarball in the examples/3d/hex8 
directory of your pylith distribution and running:

pylith testkin.cfg
pylith testdyn.cfg

The tricky part for the frictional sliding case is making sure the fault 
remains in compression. As described in the next paragraph, the fault 
implementation in the current release forces zero tractions when the 
fault opens. If you have trouble replicating this behavior in your 
simulation, make sure the solution is converging and check the 
deformation field to make sure it looks correct.

I constructed a similar example with fault opening but I had to modify 
PyLith to get the desired behavior. In the current release, as soon as 
the fault goes into tension we enforce zero traction (free surface) 
boundary conditions on the fault. In order to get the fault to open with 
initial tensile tractions on the fault, we will need to add a switch to 
turn on/off enforcing zero tractions for fault opening. Clearly, there 
are classes of problems involving dikes for which people would like to 
impose initial fault tractions that result in fault opening. This 
feature only requires adding a few lines of code, so I will put it on 
the TODO list for the version 1.7 release scheduled for June.

Regards,
Brad



On 04/23/2012 08:03 AM, Ruel Jerry wrote:
> I'm using FaultCohesiveDyn and trying to get the same result that I
> would get if I imposed slip. I am getting equal but opposite
> tractions on the two sides of the fault, but that's different from
> the FaultCohesiveKin results which have the same sign on either
> side.
>
>
> On Apr 23, 2012, at 10:58 AM, Brad Aagaard wrote:
>
>> Ruel Jerry,
>>
>> Please describe how you are applying "dynamic conditions" on the
>> fault. Are you using a Neumann or FaultCohesiveDyn object to apply
>> the tractions? The Neumann boundary condition is intended for
>> external boundaries, not interior interfaces. The FaultCohesiveDyn
>> object is intended for frictional interfaces. The
>> db_initial_tractions property can be used to impose initial
>> tractions that will be equal and opposite on the two sides of the
>> fault. We have verified that it works for mode II and mode III
>> (shear) behavior. We have also verified that it works for fault
>> opening in cases where the opening is driven by Dirichlet BC, but I
>> will have to investigate what happens if the opening is driven by
>> initial tractions.
>>
>> Regards, Brad
>>
>>
>>
>> On 04/22/2012 06:45 AM, Ruel Jerry wrote:
>>> Hi, I have what seems like a basic problem, but I can't seem to
>>> figure it out. The model that I'm running includes faults at
>>> depth that I would like to impose normal stresses on. When I use
>>> a kinematic fault where I impose fault opening displacements I
>>> get the surface displacements and the stress fields that I would
>>> expect. When I try to use dynamic conditions on the same fault
>>> and I impose tractions instead of displacement I expect to get
>>> similar results. For some reason I get the correct stress on one
>>> side of the fault, but the other side seems to have the sign of
>>> the stress reversed, and this happens for modes 1,2 and 3. For
>>> example in mode 1 if I impose slip, if I draw a line through the
>>> middle of the fault an look at the XX stress, the stress values
>>> from left to right decrease until I reach the fault then they
>>> increase symmetrically on the other side back to 0 eventually. If
>>> I impose tractions the same line shows stress values from left to
>>> right decrease until I reach the fault and then at the interface
>>> I get a dislocation, then a positive value with the same
>>> magnitude, then the stress decreases.
>>>
>>> Is this supposed to be different or am I doing something wrong?
>>> It seems like a sign problem somewhere, but I only used one value
>>> for initial tractions  and one vale for fault opening.
>>>
>>> Thanks, Ruel Jerry
>>> _______________________________________________ CIG-SHORT mailing
>>> list CIG-SHORT at geodynamics.org
>>> http://geodynamics.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/cig-short
>>>
>>
>> _______________________________________________ CIG-SHORT mailing
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>
>

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