Meshless single grain cutting simulations on the GPU

Abstract

Physically sound prediction of grinding results necessarily starts with the single grain interaction with the material, which is especially important for engineered grinding tools (EGT). The deformations encountered in single grain simulations are severe, especially due to the large negative rake angles. Conventional software tools using FEM suffer from the induced extreme distortions of the grid, necessitating costly remeshing operations. Meshless methods are not limited in the amount of deformation they can reproduce and thus are a promising alternative, which also has the potential for extreme parallelisation on the graphics co-processor (GPU). With the drastically increased computational speed unprecedented simulation resolutions can be achieved at reasonable computation times allowing parameter studies on different friction and constitutive models with first order complete meshless formulations. In the interest of reproducibility, the software tool developed is made open source and can be obtained from https://github.com/mroethli/iwf_mfree_gpu_3d.