Abstract
Industrial demand for numerical simulation of granular media is increasing for large systems. The case of interactions between grains such as unilateral contact with friction involves additional difficulties to these simulations. This study investigates a domain decomposition approach. The sub-structuration methods were originally developed for continuous media usually discretized by finite elements for solid mechanics. The LMGC90 platform (software to manage contact with distinct elements) provides a framework for the implementation of algorithms. Thus, domain decomposition algorithms, based on the LArge Time INcrement and Non Linear Gauss Seidel methods, ans suited to a granular problem are defined, implemented and compared. To exploit the potential for parallel computing of the aforementioned methods, the exchanging messages with MPI (Message Passing Interface) is added to the code. Then, the improvement of the scalability of multi-domain approaches through the addition of a macroscopic scale is tested. Finally, in order to implement a dialogue between the discrete (microscopic scale) and continuous (macroscopic scale) models, an enhanced version of the NLGS-DD method (Non Linear Gauss Seidel with domain decomposition) is proposed. The expected acceleration of the convergence is studied theoretically on reduced-size samples, prior to performing some tests on larger samples.