Published in Computational Particle Mechanics Vol. 3, pp. 407-428, 2016
doi: 10.1007/s40571-016-0109-4

Abstract

In this work, we present a new methodology for the treatment of the contact interaction between rigid boundaries and spherical discrete elements (DE). Rigid body parts are present in most of large-scale simulations. The surfaces of the rigid parts are commonly meshed with a finite element-like (FE) discretization. The contact detection and calculation between those DE and the discretized boundaries is not straightforward and has been addressed by different approaches. The algorithm presented in this paper considers the contact of the DEs with the geometric primitives of a FE mesh, i.e. facet, edge or vertex. To do so, the original hierarchical method presented by Horner et al. (J Eng Mech 127(10):1027–1032, 2001) is extended with a new insight leading to a robust, fast and accurate 3D contact algorithm which is fully parallelizable. The implementation of the method has been developed in order to deal ideally with triangles and quadrilaterals. If the boundaries are discretized with another type of geometries, the method can be easily extended to higher order planar convex polyhedra. A detailed description of the procedure followed to treat a wide range of cases is presented. The description of the developed algorithm and its validation is verified with several practical examples. The parallelization capabilities and the obtained performance are presented with the study of an industrial application example.

Back to Top

Document information

Published on 01/01/2016

DOI: 10.1007/s40571-016-0109-4
Licence: CC BY-NC-SA license

Document Score

0

Times cited: 5
Views 19
Recommendations 0

Share this document

claim authorship

Are you one of the authors of this document?