Approximate hard-sphere method for densely packed granular flows

Abstract

The simulation of granular media is usually done either with event-driven codes that treat collisions as instantaneous but have difficulty with very dense packings, or with molecular dynamics (MD) methods that approximate rigid grains using a stiff viscoelastic spring. There is a little-known method that combines several collision events into a single timestep to retain the instantaneous collisions of event-driven dynamics, but also be able to handle dense packings. However, it is poorly characterized as to its regime of validity and failure modes. We present a modification of this method to reduce the introduction of overlap error, and test it using the problem of two-dimensional (2D) granular Couette flow, a densely packed system that has been well characterized by previous work. We find that this method can successfully replicate the results of previous work up to the point of jamming, and that it can do so a factor of 10 faster than comparable MD methods.