Contact Models

The contact model construct is described in this section (see here for the list of built-in contact models). The description employs the terminology and notation defined in the “Notations” topic and the “Contact Resolution” section and assumes that the reader is familiar with that material.

The framework that is common to all contact model descriptions is presented in the “Contact Model Framework” section. The framework specifies how a contact model interacts with the distinct-element modeling framework within which it is embedded. This is followed by the built-in contact models library. The formulation of each contact model describes how the contact model uses its properties along with the relative motion of the two contacting pieces to update the generalized internal force. The ability to implement custom contact models using the C++ Plugin Option is described in “User-Defined Contact Models.”