The discrete element method (DEM), a discontinuum-based method to simulate the interaction between neighbouring particles of granular materials, suffers from intensive computational workload caused by massive particle numbers, irregular particle shapes, and complicated interaction modes from the meso-scale representation of the macro information. To promote the efficiency of the DEM and enlarge the modelling scales with a higher realism of the particle shapes, parallel computing on the graphics processing unit (GPU) is developed in this paper. The potential data race between the computing cores in the parallelisation is tackled by establishing the contact pair list with a hybrid technique. All the computations in the DEM are made on the GPU cores. Three benchmark cases, a triaxial test of a sand specimen, cone penetration test and granular flow due to a dam break, are used to evaluate the performance of the GPU parallel strategy. Acceleration of the GPU parallel simulations over the conventional CPU sequential counterparts is quantified in terms of speedup. The average speedups with the GPU parallelisation are 84, 73, and 60 for the benchmark cases.
Tracked vehicles are widely deployed for heavy lifting and transportation on inaccessible terrains such as swamps, bogs, and peatlands. The stability of a tracked vehicle is traditionally assessed only under uniaxial loading conditions and the impact of combined loading from different directions is ignored. This makes the conventional design framework somewhat unreliable. The failure envelope approach has been widely employed to assess the load-carrying capacity of shallow foundations. However, the failure envelopes available in public domain mainly focused on single isolated foundations, ignoring the interference effect between the tracks due to the rigid connection of the vehicle. This paper aims to develop an integrated framework to assess the stability of a tracked vehicle on a soft soil under fully three-dimensional loading conditions. The finite element method is adopted to simulate the soil-vehicle interactions, with the tracks idealised as two shallow foundations in parallel. The stability of the foundation system is described in terms of failure envelopes considering various track configurations and load combinations. Failure envelopes are represented by expressions and ultimately integrated into a multiple-nested function to determine the overall stability factor. The framework is demonstrated by a case study of designing a tracked vehicle under combined loading conditions.
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