Finite-element modeling of multibody contact and its application to active faults

Earthquakes have been recognized as resulting from a stick-slip frictional instability along the faults between deformable rocks. An arbitrarily shaped contact element strategy, named as node-to-point contact element strategy, is proposed and applied with the static-explicit characters to handle the friction contact between deformable bodies with stick and finite frictional slip and extended here to simulate the active faults in the crust with a more general nonlinear friction law. Also introduced is an efficient contact search algorithm for contact problems among multiple small and finite deformation bodies. Moreover, the efficiency of the parallel sparse solver for the nonlinear friction contact problem is investigated. Finally, a model for the plate movement in the Northeast zone of Japan under gravitation is taken as an example to be analyzed with different friction behaviors.