- Dynamic motion and interaction of assemblies of arbitrarily-sized particles are modeled
- Properties are associated with individual particles, allowing continuous gradations in properties and particle radii
- Clump logic supports creation of groups of slaved particles that may represent general grain shapes
- Any number of arbitrarily-oriented line segments or planar convex polygons may be specified as walls, each with its own contact properties
- General walls provide geometric objects such as points, lines, spheres, cylinders, spirals, tori, and cones
- Particle assemblies can be loaded through prescribed wall velocities, or applied forces
- Particles and walls may be added or deleted at any time during a simulation
- Default contact physics consists of: linear springs or simplified Hertz-Mindlin law, Coulomb sliding, and contact or parallel bonding
- Additional contact models include: simple viscoelastic model, simple ductile model, displacement-softening model, hystereticdamping model, Burger's creep model, and smooth-joint contact model
- Two types of damping are available: local nonviscous and viscous
- Automatic timestep calculation ensures stable solutions
- Explicit solution scheme simulates non-linear behavior without excessive memory requirements or the need for an iterative procedure
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- A quasi-static operating mode is available (in addition to fully dynamic mode) for rapid convergence to steady-state solution
- Double precision calculation ensures long-term freedom from numerical drift
- Cell-mapping scheme ensures that solution time increase only linearly with the number of particles
- Any quantity may be traced with time, stored, and plotted
- Measurements of average stress, strain rate and porosity can be made over any number of circular/spherical regions
- Energy tracing allows tracking of: body work, bond energy, boundary work, frictional work, kinetic energy, and strain energy
- Built-in programming language (FISH) provides powerful flexibility to customize analyses
- Enhanced FishTank supports generation of multiple clumped and bonded material regions with grain-size refinement
- Periodic boundaries are available. When activated, the particle assembly is in a periodic space whereby particles exiting one side also enter the opposing side.
- AC/DC (Adaptive Continuum/Discontinuum) logic is a way to handle very large models of bonded material. A "pbrick" is derived from a compacted assembly created in periodic space. Pbricks may be represented as matrices to save computation time and memory. Pbricks may also be distributed arbitrarily among a number of processors, using MPI. The AC/DC logic is only applicable to models in which deformations are small, with restricted boundary conditions.
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