TinyDEM: Minimal open granular DEM code with sliding, rolling and twisting friction

TL;DR

TinyDEM is a lightweight, open-source 3D discrete element method solver in C++ that efficiently simulates granular particles with friction, collisions, and complex geometries, suitable for educational and research purposes.

Contribution

It introduces a minimal, standalone C++ implementation of DEM with comprehensive friction and collision modeling, facilitating easy understanding and extension.

Findings

Supports polydisperse spherical particles with frictional collisions

Parallelized with OpenMP for improved performance

Open-source and easy to modify for research and education

Abstract

This article introduces TinyDEM, a lightweight implementation of a full-fledged discrete element method (DEM) solver in 3D. Newton's damped equations of motion are solved explicitly for translations and rotations of a polydisperse ensemble of dry, soft, granular spherical particles, using quaternions to represent their orientation in space without gimbal lock. Particle collisions are modeled as inelastic and frictional, including full exchange of torque. With a general particle-mesh collision routine, complex rigid geometries can be simulated. TinyDEM is designed to be a compact standalone program written in simple C++11, devoid of explicit pointer arithmetics and advanced concepts such as manual memory management or polymorphism. It is parallelized with OpenMP and published freely under the 3-clause BSD license. TinyDEM can serve as an entry point into classical DEM simulations or as a foundation for more complex models of particle dynamics.