rblock contact-resolution command

Syntax

rblock contact-resolution keyword ...

Primary keywords:

full    inhibit-contacts    inhibit-interval    reduced    tolerance    update-area

Set the default contact resolution behavior involving rigid blocks. This impacts contact resolution between rigid blocks and between wall facets and rigid blocks. By default the resolution scheme is full. In both full and reduced modes, tolerance is used to set the minimal overlap distance used to compute the contact point. See the “Rigid Blocks” section for further information on the rigid block contact resolution strategies.

Note

These values cannot be changed during cycling.

full

Set the contact resolution strategy to full. When activated, the contact position is the centroid of the overlap region. For rigid blocks with many facets this may be significantly more computationally intensive than the reduced mode.

inhibit-contacts <keyword>

Inhibit rblock-rblock contacts based on contact area. By default, contacts are inhibited if the contact area is less than 0.5 (see the face-minimum keyword) multiplied by the minimum face area of the two rblocks at the ends of the contact. This can effectively be used to inhibit the vast majority of vertex-vertex and edge-edge contacts in zero porosity packings of rblocks. Contacts not inhibited by the criterion above can also be inhibited if their areas are less than a specified factor of the maximum face area of the two rblocks at the ends of the contact (see the face-maximum keyword). By default the maximum face area is not checked.

face-maximum f

Inhibit contacts if their areas are less than f (default 0) multiplied by the maximum face area of the two rblocks at the ends of the contact.

face-minimum f

Inhibit contacts if their areas are less than f (default 0.5) multiplied by the minimum face area of the two rblocks at the ends of the contact.

probability f

Set the probability of inhibiting a contact that fits the inhibition criteria to f (default 1.0). The value can range from 0 to 1.

inhibit-interval i

Specify the interval, in number of cycles, for inhibited contacts with rigid blocks to be tested for activity. This is useful for bonded block modeling where rounding is introduced to cull edge-edge and vertex-vertex contacts. In this case, when bonding, the inactive contacts may be inhibited and periodically checked for activity, improving computational performance. By default, inhibited contacts are never tested for activity (i.e., i = 0).

reduced

Set the contact resolution strategy to reduced. When in reduced mode, the contact plane, as determined by the GJK method, is used to cut the rigid blocks, producing two overlapping {line segments in 2D; convex, planar polygons in 3D}. The contact position is the centroid of these overlapping {line segments in 2D; polygons in 3D}.

tolerance f

Set the contact resolution tolerance. This is used in both full and reduced mode. If the overlap returned by the GJK method is less than f multiplied by twice the minimal enclosing ball radius, the blocks are displaced so that they at least overlap by this computed distance during the contact resolution computation. f must be greater than 0 and should be a small fraction of 1. By default the contact resolution tolerance is 0.0. Setting a non-zero tolerance may help stability for very stiff systems with normal force computed by absolute overlap. In general, though, normal force computations by incremental normal displacements yield much higher levels of stability.

update-area b

By default, the curvatures passed to the contact models to compute contact areas with rblocks are based on the rblock enclosing ball radii. By setting the update-area to true, rblock-rblock and rblock-facet contact areas are used to compute the curvatures. The contact area is computed as the {area in 2D; volume in 3D} of the overlap region divided by the maximum penetration depth. The implication is that, for rblock-rblock or rblock-facet contacts using contacts models with stiffness in terms of stress divided by displacement (e.g., the Soft-Bond Model contact model), the effective stiffnesses respond to the overlap area. For instance, for rblock-rblock contacts between edges the effective contact stiffness may be much lower than for face-face contact configurations. The curvatures are not updated when a bond is present at the contact.