Rigid body dynamics of railway ballast

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel discrete particle simulation method for railway ballast that models rigid, frictional particles without needing deformation-force laws, avoiding numerical instability common in molecular dynamics.

Contribution

The proposed method enables stable simulation of stiff, sharply edged particles like railway ballast without relying on deformation-force laws or suffering from MD instability.

Findings

Stable simulation of railway ballast particles achieved

No need for deformation-force law knowledge

Avoids numerical instability in MD simulations

Abstract

A method for the discrete particle simulation of of almost rigid, sharply edged frictional particles, such as railway ballast is proposed. In difference to Molecular Dynamics algorithms, the method does not require knowledge about the deformation-force law of the material. Moreover, the method does not suffer from numerical instability which is encountered in MD simulations of very stiff particles.