2011 Interdisciplinary Summer School: Granular Flows

Discrete element simulations of dense granular matter: from techniques to data analysis

Lou Kondic, New Jersey Institute of Technology

This lecture will consist of two distinct parts. The first part will concentrate on the issues involved in modeling dense granular materials. We will discuss the interaction models used, as well as different computational method and software implemented by the researchers to carry out simulations efficiently. As appropriate, technical issues, such as available software packages and parallelization will be discussed. In the second part of the talk, we will concentrate on the interpretation of results, and on various approaches used in data analysis. In particular, we will concentrate on the aspects related to dense granular matter and on some classical and novel techniques used to analyze the force field structure. We will conclude by going over some recent results, including wave propagation through dense granular matter, and the influence of granular microstructure on impact of a large scale intruder.