Abstract
Bonded contact models have been increasingly used in the discrete element method (DEM) to study cemented and sintered particulate materials in recent years. Several popular DEM bond models have been proposed in the literature; thus it is beneficial to assess the similarities and differences between the different bond models before they are used in simulations. This paper identifies and discusses two fundamental types of bond models: the Spring Bond Model where two bonded particles are joined by a set of uniform elastic springs on the bond’s cross-section, and the Beam Bond Model in which a beam is used to connect the centres of two particles. A series of cantilever beam bending simulation cases were carried out to verify the findings and assess the strength and weakness of the bond models. Despite the numerous bond models described in the literature, they can all be considered as a variation of these two fundamental model types. The comparative evaluation in this paper also shows that all the bond models investigated can be unified to a general form given at a predefined contact point location.
Highlights
During the last two decades, there has been an increase in the number of attempts to apply the Discrete Element Method (DEM) to simulate the behaviour of cementitious materials like concrete, rocks and fibers [1,2,3,4,5,6,7]
The simulation cases of the parallel bond model (PBM) were carried out using the commercial software PFC3D® 5.0 with the built-in parallel bond contact model [31], while Euler–Bernoulli beam bond model (EBBM) and Timoshenko beam bond model (TBBM) codes were implemented in the commercial software EDEM® using the API [43]
A detailed assessment of the common bond models used in DEM bonded particle simulations is presented
Summary
During the last two decades, there has been an increase in the number of attempts to apply the Discrete Element Method (DEM) to simulate the behaviour of cementitious materials like concrete, rocks and fibers [1,2,3,4,5,6,7]. A number of different bonded contact models have been developed to study the failure of cementitious materials and these have been categorised into two main types of bond model – spring and beam models. Note that the single spring bond model is called the “linear contact bond model” in the commercial software Particle Flow Code (PFC) [31] Another bonded contact model available in PFC is called linear parallel bond model which is developed by Potyondy and Cundall [1]. Bonded-particle models are increasingly used in the simulations of cementitious or sintered materials, there is limited effort on comparative studies of the advantages and disadvantages of different bonded contact models. A series of verification cases were proposed to evaluate the efficacy of these commonly used bonded contact models and establish any discrepancy in the model predictions
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