The pinball contact algorithm for the material point method

H Su and TY Guan and S Wang and C Chen and Y Liu, COMPUTATIONAL PARTICLE MECHANICS, 12, 4795-4811 (2025).

DOI: 10.1007/s40571-024-00893-x

The material point method (MPM) has the advantages of no mesh distortion and high computational efficiency in numerical simulation of impact problems. The contact algorithm is an essential part of accurately simulating impact problems. The traditional grid-based contact algorithm for the MPM cannot deal well with thin-walled structures or little fragments due to the inaccurate normal direction of the contact surface. A pinball contact algorithm is presented for the MPM. Each material point is considered equivalent to a pinball of the same volume, and the contact forces are directly calculated by contact pairs instead of from the background grid nodes. The calculation of mass gradient is not needed for normal direction in the pinball contact algorithm. Therefore, the pinball contact algorithm can fully avoid the problems caused by inaccurate normal direction of the contact surface such as the reduction in computation accuracy and non-physical particle penetration. Multiple background grids are used to accelerate the searching for possible contact pairs, and the pinball contact algorithm demonstrates the capability to handle multi-body contact problems. Several examples demonstrate nice accuracy and advantages of the pinball contact algorithm.

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