Novel efficient hybrid-DEM collision integration scheme

Abstract

A hybrid collision integration scheme is introduced, benefiting from the efficient handling of binary collisions in the hard sphere scheme and the robust time scaling of the soft sphere scheme. In typical dynamic dense granular flow, simulated with the soft sphere scheme, the amount of collisions involving more than two particles are limited, and necessarily so because of loss of energy decay otherwise. Because most collisions are binary, these collisions can be handled within one time step without the necessary numerical integration as needed in a soft sphere method. The remainder of the collisions can still be handled with the classical soft sphere scheme. In this work the hybrid collisions integration scheme is shortly described and tested with a bounding box problem. The hybrid scheme is capable of solving the same problem as a classic soft sphere scheme but is roughly one order of magnitude faster.