A Serial Domain Decomposition Method for Discrete Element Method Simulation of Soil–Wheel Interactions

Abstract

We applied a serial domain decomposition method (DDM) to our two-dimensional discrete element method (DEM) program and investigated the effectiveness of DDM in terms of computer hardware. The developed program could obtain sufficiently accurate results for wheel slip, traction, and gross traction, comparable to DEM without serial DDM. We also confirmed that the soil deformation field under the wheel for DEM with serial DDM was similar to that for DEM without DDM. Moreover, the increased sub-domain loop was effective in reducing computational time in the case of serial DDM. Since each sub-domain loop contains the time integration and coordinate update routine, further optimization of memory usage in our serial DDM may be possible, which would allow large-scale three-dimensional DEM analysis on an economical desktop PC system.