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Surface deformation of the earth due to earthquake fault dislocation is very important for predicting ground motions. There are many studies on kinematic modeling of earthquake faults in both analytical and numerical methods. However, suitable investigations on improving usefulness and efficiency of those numerical methods are still necessary for relevant researchers. In this paper, displacement fields for free surface of the earth due to fault dislocation in homogeneous elastic half-space have been investigated by finite element method. Boundary conditions have significant effects on the results of finite element method, especially when the domain of the problem has infinite boundaries (half-space). Therefore, appropriate cares should be taken to increase the efficiency and accuracy of this method. In order to achieve a comprehensive study on this topic, boundaries have been modeled by two approaches here. The first approach uses common elements for infinite boundaries, while the second one uses infinite elements for those boundaries. To verify the results, each problem has been examined by several meshes and numerical solutions have been compared to Okada’s analytical solutions. In addition to the effects of the boundary modeling, the discretization effects have been investigated in order to find a suitable approach to reduce computational efforts and to increase the accuracy and efficiency of finite element method. In the modeling process, contact elements have been employed to impose fault dislocation. Three numerical examples have been provided for these finite element analyses. Each example includes four analyses without infinite elements and three analyses with infinite elements which are also compared together. The results show that not only infinite elements are necessary for quasi-static fault dislocation problems, but also they improve the performance of finite element method, so that with finer meshes and smaller dimensions of a domain, analytical solutions can be captured by numerical solutions with suitable accuracy.

Keywords: Fault dislocation, Numerical simulation, Infinite element, Elastic half-space, Finite element method.

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