A surface mesh represented discrete element method (SMR-DEM) for particles of arbitrary shape.

A surface mesh represented discrete element method (SMR-DEM) for granular systems with arbitrarily shaped particles is presented. The particle surfaces are approximated using contact nodes obtained from surface mesh. A hybrid contact method which combines the benefits of the sphere-to-sphere and sphere-to-surface approaches is proposed for contact detection and force computation. The simple formulation and implementation render SMR-DEM suitable for three-dimensional simulations. Furthermore, GPU parallelization is employed to achieve higher efficiency. Several numerical examples are presented to show the performance of SMR-DEM. It is found that on the particle level the method is accurate and convergent, while on the system level SMR-DEM can effectively model particle assemblies of various regular and complex irregular shapes. Unlabelled Image • A SMR-DEM for particlesof arbitrarily complex shapesis presented. • A hybrid contact method allowing simple and efficient contact detectionis proposed. • The SMR-DEMprovides results well corroborated byresults from the literature. • The computational cost of SMR-DEM is independent of the particle shape. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]