“…Physics engines were originally developed to rapidly simulate physical processes in computer games and animations (Millington, 2007). With an increase in accuracy, physics engines quickly were used in engineering and scientific studies including robotics (Drumwright et al, 2010;Erez et al, 2015), agricultural machinery safety (Sun et al, 2019), construction materials (Garcia-Hernandez et al, 2021), earthquake studies (Xu et al, 2013;Kim et al, 2015), rockfall hazard zoning (Hao et al, 2021), and granular soil studies (He et al, 2021;Izadi and Bezuijen, 2014;Pytlos et al, 2015;Toson and Khinast, 2017). Whereas physics engine applications involve both individual objects and particle assemblages, DEM has primarily focused on modeling mechanical behavior of particle assemblages since it was introduced (Cundall and Strack, 1979).…”