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Modeling earthquakes with off-fault damage using the combined finite-discrete element method

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Abstract

When a dynamic earthquake rupture propagates on a fault in the Earth’s crust, the medium around the fault is dynamically damaged due to stress concentrations around the rupture tip. Recent field observations, laboratory experiments and canonical numerical models show the coseismic off-fault damage is essential to describe the coseismic off-fault deformation, rupture dynamics, radiation and overall energy budget. However, the numerical modeling of “localized” off-fault fractures remains a challenge mainly because of computational limitations and model formulation shortcomings. We thus developed a numerical framework for modeling coseismic off-fault fracture networks using the combined finite-discrete element method (FDEM), and we applied it to simulate dynamic ruptures with coseismic off-fault damage on various fault configurations. This paper addresses the role of coseismic off-fault damage on rupture dynamics associated with a planar fault, as a base case, and with a number of first-order geometrical complexities, such as fault kink, step-over and roughness.

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Acknowledgements

The authors would like to acknowledge Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) Institutional Computing program for the computing resources provided for this work. This work is supported by the LANL LDRD Program (#20170004DR) and the PhD funding from Université Sorbonne Paris Cité (USPC).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA

    Kurama Okubo

  2. EES-17 - Earth and Environmental Sciences Division, Los Alamos National Laboratory, Los Alamos, NM, USA

    Esteban Rougier & Zhou Lei

  3. Laboratoire de Géologie, École Normale Supérieure/CNRS UMR 8538, PSL Research University, Paris, France

    Harsha S. Bhat

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  1. Kurama Okubo
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Okubo, K., Rougier, E., Lei, Z. et al. Modeling earthquakes with off-fault damage using the combined finite-discrete element method. Comp. Part. Mech. 7, 1057–1072 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40571-020-00335-4

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