Welcome

NetDEM is a C++ program library targeted at the computational mechanics of irregular granular materials and utilizing machine learning tools to boost the computational effciency.

It is currently capable of performing basic and general DEM simulations, with following features:

Sphere and triangle facets contact solver
GJK contact solver for convex particles
SDF contact solver for arbitrary (convex and concave) particles
Hybrid OpenMP and MPI parallel computing
Integrated mlpack machine learning environment

The supported particle shapes include sphere, cylinder, poly-super-ellipsoid, poly-super-quadrics, spherical harmonics, triangle mesh, level set, etc.

Get started

Install

Prerequisites

The compilation requires gcc, autoconf, automake, cmake, mpi, boost, which can be obtained using

# For MacOS: use brew install, such as
brew install gcc autoconf autoconf-archive automake texinfo cmake openmpi boost
        
# For Ubuntu: use apt-get install, such as
sudo apt install -y build-essential
sudo apt-get install -y autoconf-archive automake cmake texinfo git rsync
sudo apt-get install -y openmpi-bin libopenmpi-dev libboost-all-dev libomp-dev libgmp-dev

Compile and build

make

If some third-party libraries have not been or cannot be downloaded successfully, you can delete them and do a git checkout contrib and make sync_submodule again.

Test the installation

./scripts/run_tests.sh

Build or install pip and pypa packages

Install pip requisites:

pip3 install auditwheel auditwheel-symbols

To install netdem as a pip package:

make pip_install

To build netdem as a pypa wheel that is distributable:

make pypi

Examples & tutorials

Some preliminary examples are located under directory examples/, which can be run with, e.g.,

./build/bin/netdem_example_random_packing 1

For more details please refer to the website.

Visualize & post-process

Results can be dumped as VTK files, which can be visualized in paraview.

Plese refer to tools/post_process for some matlab or python scripts for post-process (e.g., VTK io, stress-strain, spherical histograms of contact anisotropy).

Support

This code is under active development. Please join us if you have an interest to contribute.

If you need help using NetDEM, or have found a bug, please open an issue or submit a pull request.