Unified displacement boundary constraint formulation for discontinuous deformation analysis (DDA)

Displacement boundary constraints in discontinuous deformation analysis (DDA) are applied using stiff penalty springs. A co‐ordinate‐free formulation for displacement boundary constraints is presented here for DDA, which unifies previous derivations for points of fixity, and for points constrained to induce or prohibit block motion in specified directions as a function of location or time. Examples for each type of constraint are used to illustrate the behaviour of the algorithm and provide a link with previous formulations for each case. The new, unified formulation has five benefits: (1) simple to express algorithmically; (2) easy to program and verify; (3) penalty values in different directions may be chosen to allow fixed points, lines, curves or planes; (4) formulation works for 2D and 3D; (5) displacement constraint may be a function of time or location or both. Feedback in the algorithm may induce internal resonance in homogeneously deformable discrete elements used in DDA, and resonance in block‐to‐block contact interactions. Consequently, high mass problems with insufficient damping may suffer from excessive ‘vibrational hammering’, inducing physically implausible behaviour such as elastic rebound. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.