4. Conclusion and outlook
In this study, a novel method was presented for simulating arbitrarily-shaped particles consisting of polygonal facets in the Discrete Element Method. Two bodies in contact are simulated as a set of interacting polygon-shaped contact primitives. As these primitives only need to contain local information about the geometry and mechanical properties, the method provides a very flexible framework to simulate contact interactions between particles of any shape and potentially non-uniform mechanical properties. Since there is no need for determining a unique contact point and normal unit vector for the contact between two arbitrary shapes, the method is not restricted to convex bodies and does not require disassembling arbitrary shapes into sets of convex bodies. It was shown that the computational cost scales quasi linearly with the number of contact primitives/particles and that – although introducing a clear additional overhead for “simple” shapes – the relative computational efficiency scales favorably when the particle shape becomes more complex. Furthermore, because each polygon–polygon contact can be individually resolved without information of the surrounding primitives, the method lends itself very well for parallelization.
