GeoBlender

A 3D demo of blender in civil/geotechnical/geological engineering refer to Taichi DEM repo.

Download & Installation dependency

$ git clone git@github.com:Linus-Civil/GeoBlender.git
$ cd GeoBlender
$ pip3 install -r requirements.txt

Run

$ python3 GeoBlender.py

Theory

• The GeoBlender.py simulates the movement and interaction of stressed assemblies of rigid {circular in 2D; spherical in 3D} particles using the Distinct-Element Method (DEM) ^[1].
• Parallel algorithm based on GPU for high performance neighbor search of particles ^[2].

New Features

Compared with the original template repo, the contribution of this repo are mainly in two aspects:

• 3D neighbor search of particles
• Description of complex geometric boundary based on fixed particles
• Atomic operation for further parallelism (Contributed by Zhu Zhe)
• The range of neighbor search is reduced from 27 to 14 in 3D

To do list

This is a case built into the commercial discrete element software-PFC. Future improvements will focus on the following aspects to achieve the same results as PFC:

• Implement of contact constitutive model which is more consistent with physics
• Description of complex boundary based on triangular meshes

References

[1] Cundall, P. A. "A Computer Model for Simulating Progressive Large Scale Movements in Blocky Rock Systems," in Proceedings of the Symposium of the International Society of Rock Mechanics (Nancy, France, 1971), Vol. 1, Paper No. II-8 (1971).

[2] https://zhuanlan.zhihu.com/p/563182093