Using particle class for a collection of beams

[Vinayak Vijay]

Dear deal.II community,

I am exploring the Particle class to simulate a collection of beams (which may or may not be in contact with each other). What i have imagined till now is to have a background grid with "particles" (imagine beams) with properties of their own. The properties of these particles will contain information about the beam - for eg. centreline, material, radius, etc. In particular, i wish to generate the centreline positions using the triangulation class.

Then after setting such up a system, i intend to use it for solving for some of the "properties" of these particles - for eg. the deformed centreline position. I also wish to use particle-level refinement for some selected particles (here beams). Therefore, different "particles" (imagine beams) will have different number of properties.

It would really help me if someone could comment on the viability of my idea to use the Particle class for such a problem. 

Thanks

Vinayak

 

[blais...@gmail.com]

Dear Vinayak,

The particle class is very flexible. You can see it as a Lagrangian container of information for whatever you may need to store information for. I don't foresee any challenges with your approach except if you need to maintain some sort of connectivity between the particles. If you do so, it will require an external data structure, since particles can only store double properties (e.g. mass, density, etc.).

We use particles extensively in our code to model granular flows (e.g.):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qxO4MD_zg2w

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v32ZqxO2X98