Development and applications of the elasto-plastic cellular automaton

The paper presents the advancement and applications of the elasto-plastic cellular automaton (EPCA), a simulator for rock mechanics and rock engineering. The most significant feature of EPCA lies in its ‘down-top’ way of dealing with nonlinear behaviors of rocks. The theory, the basic idea and associated developments, including the definition of cellular automaton, the heterogeneous material model, constitutive relations, failure criteria, the post-yield softening scheme, the thermo-hydro-mechanical coupling process, are described. The applications are presented to show the ability of EPCA to model the rock failure process, fluid flow, heat transfer, and the coupled thermo-hydro-mechanical (THM) process etc.