EFFICIENT COMPUTATION OF PARTICLE MOTIONS IN DISCRETE ELEMENT MODELING OF PARTICLE DAMPING

摘要

Particle damping is a technique of providing damping with granular particles embedded within small holes that are drilled at proper positions in a structure. Particles of various shapes, sizes, and materials are partially filled in the holes, while the particles may experience shaking motions within the holes. Particle-to-wall and particle-to-particle collisions will arise under the vibrating motion of the structure. As a result of these collisions, the structure and the particles will exchange momentum and thus dissipate kinetic energy due to frictional and in-elastic losses. The particle damping technology has been used successfully in many fields for vibration reduction. However, it is difficult to define a suitable damping model to predict its effectiveness for different applications. Discrete element method (DEM) is a computational technique for particle damping modeling. By considering hundreds or thousands of particles as Hertz balls, a discrete element model can describe the motions of these multi-bodies and determine the energy dissipation. In this article, we describe a modeling system based on the DEM concept for efficient numerical simulation of particle damping. The focus of the paper is on computation algorithms for large scale particle damping systems with thousands of particles. The computational methods developed are illustrated with examples of simulation applications.