Numerical Simulation on Dense Packing of Granular Materials by Container Oscillation

Abstract EN

The packing of granular materials is a basic and important problem in geomechanics.

An approach, which generates dense packing of spheres confined in cylindrical and cuboidal containers in three steps, is introduced in this work.

A loose packing structure is first generated by means of a reference lattice method.

Then a dense packing structure is obtained in a container by simulating dropping of particles under gravitational forces.

Furthermore, a scheme that makes the bottom boundary fluctuate up and down was applied to obtain more denser packing.

The discrete element method (DEM) was employed to simulate the interactions between particle-particle and particle-boundary during the particles’ motions.

Finally, two cases were presented to indicate the validity of the method proposed in this work.