STL object import: cement mixer drum

This page contains two demonstrations of setting up a discrete element simulation (DEM) of a cement mixer drum taken from a 3d-printing object library filled with polydisperse granular particles.

In the first example, the triangulated surfaces are modeled with particles that were created using the create_atoms mesh command. This does not need any other special features in LAMMPS, however the size of the mesh particles and the mesh refinement options have to be carefully chosen to get a good approximation of the desired surface and shape. The resulting trajectory was then visualized with VMD using the built-in raytracing and manually converted to a movie.

The second example is an attempt to recreate this simulation and movie by using the recently added features for modeling granular surfaces and advanced visualization in the LAMMPS dump image command. This visualization was designed and refined using LAMMPS-GUI and the movie was created from the snapshot images directly from the LAMMPS-GUI slideshow viewer using FFMpeg .