Abstract
A surface mesh represented discrete element method (SMR-DEM) for granular systems with arbitrarily shaped particles is presented. The particle surfaces are approximated using contact nodes obtained from surface mesh. A hybrid contact method which combines the benefits of the sphere-to-sphere and sphere-to-surface approaches is proposed for contact detection and force computation. The simple formulation and implementation render SMR-DEM suitable for three-dimensional simulations. Furthermore, GPU parallelization is employed to achieve higher efficiency. Several numerical examples are presented to show the performance of SMR-DEM. It is found that on the particle level the method is accurate and convergent, while on the system level SMR-DEM can effectively model particle assemblies of various regular and complex irregular shapes.
Highlights
Granular systems consisting of macroscopic particles widely present in nature, industries, and engineering
In surface mesh represented discrete element method (SMR-discrete element method (DEM)), the particle surface is represented with contact nodes, which can be conveniently obtained from surface mesh
The particle properties such as unit normals at contact nodes, total mass, centroid, and moment of inertia can be directly calculated
Summary
Granular systems consisting of macroscopic particles widely present in nature, industries, and engineering. An ideal method should possess the following features: (1) it is efficient, or at least can be conveniently and efficiently parallelized; (2) its formulations and implementation are simple in threedimensions; (3) it should be stable and accurate in contact detection and force calculation, or at least have convergent behaviour; (4) it can model particles of any shape, e.g. regular, polyhedral, and arbitrarily irregular, using the same algorithm; (5) the data preparation should be simple. By directly utilizing the triangular meshes, additional algorithms for describing particle shapes, e.g. the filling algorithms in the multi-sphere method [42,43,44,45], super-quadric equations [28], or level-set functions [30, 31], are no longer needed This greatly simplifies the formulation, implementation, and data preparation. One should seek recourse from other approaches for computing the moment of inertia
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