- For the prediction of digging forces from a granular material simulation, the
Nonsmooth Contact Dynamics Method is examined. First, the equations of motion
for nonsmooth mechanical systems are laid out. They are a differential
variational inequality that has the same structure as classical discrete algebraic equations. Using a Galerkin projection in time, it becomes possible to derive
nonsmooth versions of the classical SHAK and RATTLE integrators.
A matrix-free Interior Point Method is used for the complementarity
problems that need to be solved in every time step. It is shown that this method
outperforms the Projected Gauss-Jacobi method by several orders of magnitude
and produces the same digging force result as the Discrete Element Method in comparable computing time.