Discrete element simulation of SiC ceramic containing a single pre-existing flaw under uniaxial compression

Discrete element modeling of the machining processes of brittle materials: recent development and future prospective

“…In the BPM model of brittle materials, the characterization of these material parameters is achieved by setting the bond model between particles [21]. In the BPM model, the mechanical properties of particles and parallel bonds are defined on a microscopic scale, such as the particle stiffness, the coefficient of friction between the particles and the strength of the parallel bond and so on.…”

“…Thanks to the development of computer technology and computing methods, many numerical simulation methods such as finite element method (FEM) [5][6][7], extended finite element method (XFEM) [8], smooth particle hydrodynamics method (SPH) [9][10][11], molecular dynamics (MD) [12][13][14][15] , discrete element method (DEM) [16][17][18][19][20][21] and boundary element method (BEM) [22,23] are used to study the processing damage in hard-brittle materials at different levels of length scales, as shown in Fig. 1.…”

“…The hard-brittle materials are usually treated as collection of bonded particles, so the generation and the propagation of micro-cracks in the materials are described as the damage of bonds. In this way, the damage and crack happened in the hard-brittle material during the machining process can be effectively reflected [21,29]. Due to the advantages of DEM different from the above numerical methods, it is widely used in the fields of rock [17,[30][31][32], soil mechanics [33][34][35], brittle material processing [19,29,36], etc.…”

“…Meanwhile, since the hard-brittle materials normally contain a lot of micro-cracks with different size, shape and orientation, these internal defects will affect the mechanical properties [39][40][41] and processing quality [27] of the hard-brittle materials (such as ceramics). By deleting particles to generate random defects inside the DEM model, researchers can simulate the physical structure of the real material, and explore the crack propagation and mechanical properties of the brittle material containing the defect under external load [21,42]. Since the DEM was first applied to simulation of rock materials, researchers in various countries have gradually used DEM as a useful simulation method for the motion of dis-continuous materials and the damage of continuous materials.…”

Discrete element simulation of particle motion in ball mills based on similarity

“…DEM is based on Newton's second law to track the movement of each particle in the particle assembly and simulate the collision of between particles. It has been successfully applied to soil [2,3], rock [4], powder [5][6][7] and other bulk materials for particle movement analysis and ceramic [8][9][10], concrete [11,12] and other brittle materials for crushing and crack propagation simulations. Although the DEM has provided useful results in the simulation of particle flow behaviour, it requires extremely large computer capacity as the numerical model reaches to a level of tens of millions of particles in three dimensions.…”