A new algorithm for contact detection between spherical particle and triangulated mesh boundary in discrete element method simulations

Hu, Linfeng; Hu, Guoming; Fang, Ziqiang; Zhang, Y.

doi:10.1002/nme.4487

Cited by 23 publications

(23 citation statements)

References 29 publications

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“…Other redundant points arise from whole faces hitting another object, ie, from non‐point collisions. Sophisticated elimination algorithms to identify non‐physical pairs of contact points are known . For our setups, we however neglect/simplify this application challenge and average any two contact points for a particle into one, if they are closer than the particle's minimum mesh size and carry reasonably close normals. Compute a force per contact point.…”

Section: Algorithmic Core Componentsmentioning

confidence: 99%

A multi‐core ready discrete element method with triangles using dynamically adaptive multiscale grids

Krestenitis

Weinzierl

2018

Concurrency and Computation

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Summary The simulation of vast numbers of rigid bodies of non‐analytical shapes and of tremendously different sizes that collide with each other is computationally challenging. A bottleneck is the identification of all particle contact points per time step. We propose a tree‐based multilevel meta data structure to administer the particles. The data structure plus a purpose‐made tree traversal identifying the contact points introduce concurrency to the particle comparisons, whilst they keep the absolute number of particle‐to‐particle comparisons low. Furthermore, a novel adaptivity criterion allows explicit time stepping to work with comparably large time steps. It optimises both toward low algorithmic complexity per time step and low numbers of time steps. We study three different parallelisation strategies exploiting our traversal's concurrency. The fusion of two of them yields promising speedups once we rely on maximally asynchronous task‐based realisations. Our work shows that new computer architecture can push the boundary of rigid particle computability, yet if and only if the right data structures and data processing schemes are chosen.

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Section: Algorithmic Core Componentsmentioning

confidence: 99%

A multi‐core ready discrete element method with triangles using dynamically adaptive multiscale grids

Krestenitis

Weinzierl

2018

Concurrency and Computation

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“…In the DEM simulations, contact detection is a two‐stage process including neighbor searching and contact resolution 20 . Neighbor searching is used to find out the potential contact pairs between structural boundaries and particles 17 . Employing the neighbor searching, such as the cell‐based algorithm 21 and its revised algorithms, 22,23 the operations taken in contact detection can reduce from O(N 2 ) to the lower levels.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A DEM‐based method for predicting the wear evolution of structural boundary composed of spherical boundary elements

Fang

Hu²,

Peng

et al. 2020

Numerical Meth Engineering

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Summary In the discrete element method (DEM) simulation for wear prediction, structural boundary is now represented extensively by triangular meshes with high resolution, which brings a huge computational cost. A DEM‐based method for predicting the wear evolution of structural boundary has been developed for computational efficiency. The structural boundary subjected to wear is represented by the spherical boundary elements in the DEM simulation in combination with the inside triangles and fitting curved surface in wear prediction. Wear prediction is performed through a series of evolution steps. In each evolution step, the collision energies by particles at structural boundary are collected via the DEM simulation and assigned to the boundary elements. Then, the volume losses of structural boundary are predicted across each relevant boundary element. Finally, the new geometry of structural boundary in response to wear is described by moving the boundary elements along the depths of wear individually. Through converting the contact detection between structural boundary and particles into between spherical boundary elements and particles, our method greatly reduces the computational cost in the DEM simulation. Through two numerical tests, our method has been verified to be an efficient and accurate method for the wear prediction of structural boundaries with different resolutions.

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“…We have adapted some of the procedures existing in the computer graphics bibliography [11,20] to the case where the facet contact (inside of the FE) occurs in a substantial higher frequency compared to edge and vertex geometrical contact types. See [18] where the type of contact frequency (facet, edge, vertex) is determined for different number of particles and relative sizes.…”

Section: Fast Intersection Testmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…This approach, however, does not consider the cases when a spherical particle might be in contact with the entities of different surfaces at the same time (multiple contacts) leading to an inaccurate contact interaction. The upgraded RIGID-II method presented later by Su et al [35] and also the method proposed by Hu et al [18] account for the multiple contact situations, but they have a complex elimination procedure with many different contact scenarios to distinguish, which is difficult to code in practice. Recently Chen et al [6] presented a very simple and accurate algorithm which covers many situations.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Table 1 summarizes the strengths and drawbacks of the reviewed contact detection methods. Methods based in storing all the potential contacts to lately remove the invalid ones (RIGID-II [35], Hu et al [18], Chen et al [6] and H 2 ) are the most accurate. They treat the cases with large indentations (relative to the size of the FE) and give a solution for the contact continuity in non-smooth regions of the boundary.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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The Double Hierarchy Method. A parallel 3D contact method for the interaction of spherical particles with rigid FE boundaries using the DEM

et al. 2016

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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) 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.

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A new algorithm for contact detection between spherical particle and triangulated mesh boundary in discrete element method simulations

Cited by 23 publications

References 29 publications

A multi‐core ready discrete element method with triangles using dynamically adaptive multiscale grids

A multi‐core ready discrete element method with triangles using dynamically adaptive multiscale grids

A DEM‐based method for predicting the wear evolution of structural boundary composed of spherical boundary elements

The Double Hierarchy Method. A parallel 3D contact method for the interaction of spherical particles with rigid FE boundaries using the DEM

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