Resolving force indeterminacy in contact dynamics using compatibility conditions
Name
1805.07437.pdf
Description
Submitted version
Size
2.7 MB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
1918cde0c6826f3e7fc39a38e4ac74f6
Author(s)
Olsen, Tyler John
Kamrin, Kenneth N
Date Issued
September 2018
Journal
Granular Matter
Publisher
Springer Nature
Citation
Olsen, Tyler and Ken Kamrin, "Resolving force indeterminacy in contact dynamics using compatibility conditions." Granular Matter 20, 4 (September 2018): 69 doi. 10.1007/s10035-018-0839-5 ©2018 Authors
Version
Original manuscript
Abstract
Contact dynamics (CD) is a powerful method to solve the dynamics of large systems of colliding rigid bodies. CD can be computationally more efficient than classical penalty-based discrete element methods (DEM) for simulating contact between stiff materials such as rock, glass, or engineering metals. However, by idealizing bodies as perfectly rigid, contact forces computed by CD can be non-unique due to indeterminacy in the contact network, which is a common occurence in dense granular flows. We propose a frictionless CD method that is designed to identify only the unique set of contact forces that would be predicted by a soft particle method, such as DEM, in the limit of large stiffness. The method involves applying an elastic compatibility condition to the contact forces, which maintains no-penetration constraints but filters out force distributions that could not have arisen from stiff elastic contacts. The method can be used as a post-processing step that could be integrated into existing CD codes with minimal effort. We demonstrate its efficacy in a variety of indeterminate problems, including some involving multiple materials, non-spherical shapes, and nonlinear contact constitutive laws. ©2018, Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Mechanical Engineering
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Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike
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DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1007/S10035-018-0839-5
