Jan Kleinert, Bernd Simeon, Klaus Dressler

• 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.