LIGGGHTS an Open Source Discrete Element Simulations of Granular Materials based on LAMMPS

In this work, we present the development of an open-source software for modeling granular material by means of the Discrete Element Method. LIGGGHTS (www.liggghts.com) stands for ‘LAMMPS Improved for General Granular and Granular Heat Transfer Simulations’ and is based on LAMMPS (‘Large Atomic and Molecular Massively Parallel Simulator’), a successful open source Molecular Dynamics code written and distributed by Sandia National Laboratories for massively parallel computing on distributed memory machines. We first give a brief overview of implemented models and features. These comprise CAD geometry import, features for particle insertion and packing, contact models, wallstress analysis, moving mesh capability, a 6 DOF feature and non-spherical particle handling. Finally, we would like to focus on the simulation of coupled granular-fluid systems with the CFD-DEM approach.