Extension of the pe Physics Engine by Discrete Element Methods

Ich versichere, daß ich die Arbeit ohne fremde Hilfe und ohne Benutzung anderer als der angegebenen Quellen angefertigt habe und daß die Arbeit in gleicher oderähnlicher Form noch keiner anderen Prüfungsbehörde vorgelegen hat und von dieser als Teil einer Prüfungsleistung angenommen wurde. Alle Ausführungen, die wörtlich oder sinngemäßübernommen wurden, sind als solche gekennzeichnet. Granular materials are of great importance to industrial engineering and even in our everyday life. However, there exists not yet a consistent theory describing the behaviour of granular materials. With numerical simulations it is possible to at least partially replace expensive experiments in industrial applications and to support improvements in the theory. A typical approach for the numerical simulation of granular materials are Discrete Element Methods (DEM). In this thesis we will present and discuss the whole procedure that is necessary to perform granular material simulations with fully resolved three-dimensional objects with Discrete Element Methods. We will show that Discrete Element Methods can be successfully adapted to the pe Physics Engine, a simulation framework with a special focus on massively parallel simulations, and that with our parallel DEM algorithm it is possible to achieve a very good scaling behaviour with over two billion of non-spherical granular particles on a large number of processor cores. Additionally, we will present several simulation examples that reveal the typical behaviour of granular materials.