Nonsmooth Contact Dynamics for the Large-Scale Simulation of Granular Material

Prof. Bernd Simeon

April 28, 2017, 10:45 a.m. S2 046

For the large-scale simulation of granular material, the Nonsmooth Contact Dynamics Method is presented. First, the equations of motion of nonsmooth mechanical systems are introduced and classified as a differential variational inequality that has a structure similar to differential-algebraic equations. Using a Galerkin projection in time, we derive nonsmooth extensions of the SHAKE and RATTLE schemes for their numerical integration. A matrix-free interior point method is used for the complementarity problems that need to be solved in each time step. We demonstrate that in this way, the NSCD approach yields highly accurate results and is competitive when compared to the Discrete Element Method (DEM).