Finite element modeling of interacting fault systems

This paper firstly reviews the relevant research activities on the finite element modeling of interacting fault systems, including the related finite element commercial software and mesh generation, and then presents our long term and on-going efforts towards the integrated finite element software platform for integrating our finite element software with the related digital image information of the Earth to simulate the dynamics of interacting fault systems, which includes the interface and module construction for the geometrical modeling (i.e. fault model construction) with the related available observation data, mesh generation, finite element modeling and result visualization. Finally, a numerical simulation of the Southern California interacting fault system is presented to demonstrate its capability and usefulness.