Granular jamming has been identified as a fundamental mechanism for the operation of robotic grippers. In this work, we show, that soft particles like expanded polystyrene beads lead to significantly larger gripping forces in comparison to rigid particles. In contradiction to naive expectation, the combination of jamming and elasticity gives rise to very different properties of the jammed phase, compared to hard-particle systems. This may be of interest also beyond the application in robotic grippers.
Jammed granular matter can be considered a meta-material that behaves viscoelastic for small deformations. We characterize the elastic properties of the meta-material through the response of a simply supported bending beam consisting of jammed granular matter under weak load and quasistatic deformation.
For a wide range of applications, we need DEM simulations of granular matter in contact with elastic flexible boundaries. We present a novel method to describe the interaction between granular particles and a flexible elastic membrane. Here, the standard mass-spring model approach is supplemented by surface patches given by triangulation of the membrane. In contrast to standard mass-spring models, our simulation method allows for an efficient simulation even for large particle size dispersion. The novel method allows coarsening of the mass-spring system leading to a substantial increase in computation efficiency. The simulation method is demonstrated and benchmarked for a triaxial test.
In this paper we introduce the open-source code MercuryDPM: a code for simulating discrete particles. The paper discusses software and management issues that may be interesting for the developers of other open-source codes. Then we review the new features that have been added since the last publication: an improved Hertz-Mindlin model; a new liquid bridge model of Lian and Seville; a droplet-spray model; better support for re-creating complex, measured particle size distributions; a new implementation of rigid clumps; an implementation of elastic membranes; a wear model for walls; a soft-kill feature and a cloud-deployment interface for AWS.
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