Abstract
The discrete element method (DEM) is a popular tool for simulating soils, however it has rarely been used for modelling clays. This is despite the behaviour of clays being much less well understood compared to sands. This paper aims to increase the use of DEM to investigate clays by highlighting some important issues concerning the implementation of particle interactions to any model. When using spheres as the elementary unit in DEM, it is shown how special attention is needed to ensure repeatable interactions between platelets, and also how the geometry of the platelets affect both the normal and tangential interactions.
Highlights
The discrete element method (DEM) is a well-known numerical tool for modelling and investigating the microscopic behaviour of granular materials, coarse-grained soils
Attempts to uncover the microscale mechanisms governing the behaviour of clays using DEM have been few and far between due to several issues presented by clay particles
It has been shown that when using elementary spheres to model platelets, care needs to be taken to ensure repeatability for any/all platelet interactions
Summary
The discrete element method (DEM) is a well-known numerical tool for modelling and investigating the microscopic behaviour of granular materials, coarse-grained soils. Contact detection algorithms for non-spherical particles are more computationally expensive compared to spheres, so any improvement in computational time does not scale directly with the reduced number of discrete elements and contacts For these reasons, it can be argued that using the sphere-based approach to model platelets currently remains the most viable option; and is used by others studying colloidal platelets in non-geotechnical contexts [9]. Due to the size of clay platelets (generally
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