Development of a GPU-based multisphere DE–FE coupling method for interaction simulations between an off-road tire and a gravel terrain

Abstract

For decades, growing interest has been devoted to simulating the tire–soil interaction phenomena using discrete element/finite element (DE–FE) coupling methods. In contrast to the widely used approach that idealizes soils as spherical DEs, a newly developed multisphere DE–FE method has been demonstrated to be more accurate in reproducing such phenomena; however, it requires considerable computational cost for large-scale tire–soil interaction simulations. Therefore, this study aims to develop an efficient graphics processing unit (GPU)-based multisphere DE–FE method based on a CUDA FORTRAN programming environment. To this end, two-level grids are introduced for the parallelization of contact detection for targeted multisphere DEs and subspheres, which helps to find contact pairs for the targeted subspheres of a multisphere DE in an efficient manner. In contrast to existing GPU-based parallelization techniques, which typically use atomic operations to avoid memory access conflicts, this study presents a parallelization strategy to process a contact pair between bounding spheres using one GPU thread to efficiently handle with owner-member relationships between multisphere DEs and their subspheres. In the parallelization for force calculation, our method introduces an efficient technique that utilizes one GPU thread to process a contact pair between subspheres, or between subspheres and FE segments, to reduce the number of repeated calculations. Finally, the developed GPU-based method is applied to analyze the travelling behaviors of a complex-patterned off-road tire on a gravel terrain, and the effectiveness and computational efficiency of this method are validated via indoor soil-bin experimental outcomes as well as serial and parallel simulation results. It is found that a speedup of approximately 38 has been achieved with the aid of the developed method.