On the Importance of Displacement History in Soft-Body Contact Models

Two approaches are commonly used for handling frictional contact within the framework of the discrete element method (DEM). One relies on the complementarity method (CM) to enforce a nonpenetration condition and the Coulomb dry-friction model at the interface between two bodies in mutual contact. The second approach, called the penalty method (PM), invokes an elasticity argument to produce a frictional contact force that factors in the local deformation and relative motion of the bodies in contact. We give a brief presentation of a DEM-PM contact model that includes multi-time-step tangential contact displacement history. We show that its implementation in an open-source simulation capability called Chrono is capable of accurately reproducing results from physical tests typical of the field of geomechanics, i.e., direct shear tests on a monodisperse material. Keeping track of the tangential contact displacement history emerges as a key element of the model. We show that identical simulations using contact models that include either no tangential contact displacement history or only single-time-step tangential contact displacement history are unable to accurately model the direct shear test.