Submission Deadline: 31 January 2021 (closed)
Granular materials exist widely in nature or industrial production, and form complex granular systems with structures. A granular system has complex mechanical properties of solid or liquid, and quasi-solid-liquid transition may occur under certain conditions. The discrete element method (DEM) was proposed in 1979 and has been shown to be a practical tool for studying the macro and mesoscopic behaviors of various granular materials. In this approach, the particle shape strongly affects the granular packing, dynamic responses, and flow processes of granular materials. Moreover, the conclusions obtained from spherical systems are difficult to apply directly to non-spherical systems. During the flow process, the particles may be rearranged to form an arch structure. The adjacent particles contact with each other to form a force chain structure of varying strength, so that the granular flow is changed from a dense state to a blocked state. Although DEM has been successfully applied to the study of basic physical and mechanical properties of granular materials, there are still many challenges in computational granular mechanics, such as the construction of real particle morphology, flow pattern transition of granular materials, multi-media and multi-scale contact model, force chain network within the granular system, and high-performance parallel algorithm.
The aim of this special issue is to bring together the latest advances in computational mechanics and engineering applications of granular materials, with particular emphasis on the theoretical constructions of arbitrarily shaped particles, flow pattern transitions, GPU parallel algorithms, and multi-scale and multi-media models, and to improve our understanding of granular systems in view of large scale and practical engineering applications.
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