Normal and Shear Stresses in Sub-contacts

3DEC
1

Hi,

I am going to extract normal and shear stress values in sub-contacts of a DFN through a FISH by division of corresponding force values by sub-contact area. For some DFN examples (in my case DFNs with 50+ fractures) an error of “trying to divide by zero” pops up. Is this error still related to the famous so called “negative/zero block volume” error? If it is so, is there any solution other than those in Itasca website to get rid of this error?
By the way, I am using 3DEC 5.20.

Any help will be highly appreciated.

2

Sometimes subcontacts have area = 0. You just need to check that the area > 0 before dividing.

3

Thanks for your help Jim.