2,686 research outputs found
Combined 3D thinning and greedy algorithm to approximate realistic particles with corrected mechanical properties
The shape of irregular particles has significant influence on micro- and
macro-scopic behavior of granular systems. This paper presents a combined 3D
thinning and greedy set-covering algorithm to approximate realistic particles
with a clump of overlapping spheres for discrete element method (DEM)
simulations. First, the particle medial surface (or surface skeleton), from
which all candidate (maximal inscribed) spheres can be generated, is computed
by the topological 3D thinning. Then, the clump generation procedure is
converted into a greedy set-covering (SCP) problem.
To correct the mass distribution due to highly overlapped spheres inside the
clump, linear programming (LP) is used to adjust the density of each component
sphere, such that the aggregate properties mass, center of mass and inertia
tensor are identical or close enough to the prototypical particle. In order to
find the optimal approximation accuracy (volume coverage: ratio of clump's
volume to the original particle's volume), particle flow of 3 different shapes
in a rotating drum are conducted. It was observed that the dynamic angle of
repose starts to converge for all particle shapes at 85% volume coverage
(spheres per clump < 30), which implies the possible optimal resolution to
capture the mechanical behavior of the system.Comment: 34 pages, 13 figure
Procedural function-based modelling of volumetric microstructures
We propose a new approach to modelling heterogeneous objects containing internal volumetric structures with size of details orders of magnitude smaller than the overall size of the object. The proposed function-based procedural representation provides compact, precise, and arbitrarily parameterised models of coherent microstructures, which can undergo blending, deformations, and other geometric operations, and can be directly rendered and fabricated without generating any auxiliary representations (such as polygonal meshes and voxel arrays). In particular, modelling of regular lattices and cellular microstructures as well as irregular porous media is discussed and illustrated. We also present a method to estimate parameters of the given model by fitting it to microstructure data obtained with magnetic resonance imaging and other measurements of natural and artificial objects. Examples of rendering and digital fabrication of microstructure models are presented
Local error estimates for adaptive simulation of the Reaction-Diffusion Master Equation via operator splitting
The efficiency of exact simulation methods for the reaction-diffusion master
equation (RDME) is severely limited by the large number of diffusion events if
the mesh is fine or if diffusion constants are large. Furthermore, inherent
properties of exact kinetic-Monte Carlo simulation methods limit the efficiency
of parallel implementations. Several approximate and hybrid methods have
appeared that enable more efficient simulation of the RDME. A common feature to
most of them is that they rely on splitting the system into its reaction and
diffusion parts and updating them sequentially over a discrete timestep. This
use of operator splitting enables more efficient simulation but it comes at the
price of a temporal discretization error that depends on the size of the
timestep. So far, existing methods have not attempted to estimate or control
this error in a systematic manner. This makes the solvers hard to use for
practitioners since they must guess an appropriate timestep. It also makes the
solvers potentially less efficient than if the timesteps are adapted to control
the error. Here, we derive estimates of the local error and propose a strategy
to adaptively select the timestep when the RDME is simulated via a first order
operator splitting. While the strategy is general and applicable to a wide
range of approximate and hybrid methods, we exemplify it here by extending a
previously published approximate method, the Diffusive Finite-State Projection
(DFSP) method, to incorporate temporal adaptivity
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