Study on Development of Pre-processing Program for FLAC^3D and Its Engineering Application of Numerical Simulation Calculation in Underground Cavern Group

FLAC^3D (Fast Lagrangian Analysis of Continua in 3 Dimensions), developed by Itasca Consulting Group Inc., USA, is widely used as computational package in the world. For some complex geologic problems, numerical models with FLAC^3D are difficult to construct. Therefore, a fast modeling method, which consists of building complicated numerical models with FLAC^3D by using ANSYS software, is put forward to define material properties, and for meshing. The interface program of ANSYS_TO_FLAC^3D is made by using Visual Fortran language in order to import the complicated model into FLAC^3D, thereby building a complicated model in FLAC^3D. Thus, two three dimensional numerical models of an underground caver group are developed. The case study shows the advantage and feasibility of above method on modeling and meshing. The result shows that the complicated FLAC^3D model is satisfactory. The greater computational power of FLAC^3D has been used and the utilities of both programs have been extended. This method of building complicated models with FLAC^3D may have some reference values.