A highly efficient discrete element approach for granular damping analysis

Abstract

Granular damping is a technique of achieving high structural damping with granules embedded within or attached to the vibrating structure. The discrete element method (DEM), which is based on the direct dynamic analysis of all granules using Newton's equations, can accurately predict the granular damping behavior. However, the numerical implementation of such approach is complicated and the key issue is the time-consuming granule contact detection in DEM. In this research, a new computational scheme is presented for granular damping analysis using DEM. Instead of using the straightforward search over all granular pairs, the link cell (LC) method is used to find the candidate pairs for possible contacts, which performs contact check of a granule only with the neighbor granules. To further reduce the number of candidate pairs, a Verlet table is incorporated with the LC method which lists all granular pairs whose distances are less than a threshold distance d t . The Verlet table for candidate pairs can be updated in an adaptive manner, corresponding to the dynamic states of the vibrating system. Collectively, these improvements can increase the computational efficiency of DEM by multiple times as compared to the state-of-the-art.