Highlights

The authors thank Sandia National Laboratory for their financial support, which has made this work possible. This work is the result of a collaboration between Sandia National Laboratories, Albuquerque, NM, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA. Sandia is a multiprogram laboratory operated by Sandia Corporation, a Lockheed Martin Company, for the United States Department of Energy under contract DE-AC04-94AL85000.

Keywords Computational geometry, Modelling

Abstract The efficiency of a discrete element implementation relies on several factors, including the particle representation, neighbor-sorting algorithm, contact resolution, and force generation. The focus of this paper is on the four-arc approximation for an ellipsoid - a geometrical representation useful in simulations of large numbers of smoothly shaped particles. A new contact resolution algorithm based on the four-arc approximation is presented, which takes advantage of the properties of the geometry to provide favorable empirical convergence properties compared with the method proposed earlier. Special attention is given to the software implementation of the algorithm, and a discussion of the computational efficiency of the algorithm is provided.

Introduction

The capability of discrete element modeling (DEM) to model physics at the grain scale has made it a leading computational method...