Methods and distributed software for visualization of cracks propagating in discrete particle systems

Scientific visualization is becoming increasingly important in analyzing and interpreting numerical and experimental data sets. Parallel computations of discrete particle systems lead to large data sets that can be produced, stored and visualized on distributed IT infrastructures. However, this leads to very complicated environments handling complex simulation and interactive visualization on the remote heterogeneous architectures. In micro-structure of continuum, broken connections between neighbouring particles can form complex cracks of unknown geometrical shape. The complex disjoint surfaces of cracks with holes and unavailability of a suitable scalar field defining the crack surfaces limit the application of the common surface extraction methods. The main visualization task is to extract the surfaces of cracks according to the connectivity of the broken connections and the geometry of the neighbouring particles. The research aims at enhancing the visualization methods of discrete particle systems and increasing speed of distributed visualization software.

The dissertation consists of introduction, three main chapters and general conclusions. In the first Chapter, a literature review on visualization software, distributed environments, discrete element simulation of particle systems and crack visualization methods is presented. In the second Chapter, novel visualization methods were proposed for extraction of crack surfaces from monodispersed particle systems modelled by the discrete element method. The cell cut-based method, the Voronoi-based method and cell centre-based method explicitly define geometry of propagating cracks in fractured regions. The proposed visualization methods were implemented in the grid visualization e–service VizLitG and the distributed visualization software VisPartDEM. Partial data set transfer from the grid storage element was developed to reduce the data transfer and visualization time.

In the third Chapter, the results of experimental research are presented. The performance of e-service VizLitG was evaluated in a geographically distributed grid. Different types of software were employed for data transfer in order to present the quantitative comparison. The performance of the developed visualization methods was investigated. The quantitative comparison of the execution time of local Voronoi-based method and that of global Voronoi diagrams generated by Voro++ library was presented. The accuracy of the developed methods was evaluated by computing the total depth of cuts made in particles by the extracted crack surfaces. The present research confirmed that the proposed visualization methods and the developed distributed software were capable of visualizing crack propagation modelled by the discrete element method in monodispersed particulate media.

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DOI: https://doi.org/10.20334/2343-M