Energy-conserving contact dynamics of nonspherical rigid-body particles

Understanding the contact dynamics of nonspherical particles is crucial for accurately modeling colloidal and granular systems where shape anisotropy dictates structural organization and transport properties. We here introduce an energy-conserving contact dynamics framework for arbitrary convex rigid-body particles by implementing vertex–boundary interactions in 2D and vertex–surface and edge–edge detection in 3D. The established formulation enables continuous force evaluation and prevents particle overlap while conserving total energy during translational and rotational motion. We demonstrate the framework’s stability and its utility to capture packing behavior, anisotropic diffusion, and equations of state of polygonal and polyhedral particles as examples. The framework establishes a robust and extensible foundation for investigating nonequilibrium dynamics of complex nonspherical particulate systems, enabling enhanced understanding of phenomena across spatiotemporal scales in self- and directed-assembly, granular flows, and hydrodynamics, potentially coupled with interactions that represent underlying physical mechanisms.

• Publication year

  2025

• Venue

  APL Computational Physics

• Publication date

  2025-10-28

• Fields of study

  Materials Science, Physics

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1063/5.0319853arXiv 2510.24945
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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