Multiscale modeling of coupled thermo-mechanical behavior of granular media in large deformation and flow

Heat generation and transfer in a granular material can be intricately coupled with their mechanical responses, playing a key role in causing excessive large deformation, flow and failure of the material. The coupling may manifest in various forms, including thermal induced stress, mechanically induced heat and thermally induced melting in granular media. We propose a novel hierarchical multiscale modeling framework, TM-DEMPM, to model the coupled thermo-mechanical behavior in granular media which may undergo large deformation and flow. Material Point Method (MPM) is hierarchically coupled with Discrete Element Method (DEM) to offer physics-based, natural scale-crossing simulations of thermo-mechanical granular responses without assuming complicated phenomenological constitutive models. To offer speedup for the numerical solution, hybrid OpenMP and GPU-based parallelization is proposed to take advantage of the hierarchical computing structure of the framework. The proposed framework may provide an effective and efficient pathway to next-generation simulation of engineering-scale large-deformation problems that involve complicated thermo-mechanical coupling in granular media.

Automated summary

The text discusses the intricate coupling between heat generation and transfer with mechanical responses in granular materials, introducing a novel hierarchical multiscale modeling framework TM-DEMPM. This framework utilizes Material Point Method coupled with Discrete Element Method to provide physics-based simulations of thermo-mechanical granular responses, with a proposed hybrid OpenMP and GPU-based parallelization for faster numerical solutions.