Energy-Conserving Contact Dynamics of Nonspherical Rigid-Body Particles

Abstract

Understanding the contact dynamics of nonspherical particles beyond the microscale is crucial for accurately modeling colloidal and granular systems, where shape anisotropy dictates structural organization and transport properties. In this paper, we introduce an energy-conserving contact dynamics framework for arbitrary convex rigid-body particles, integrating vertex-boundary interactions in 2D with vertex-surface and edge-edge detection in 3D. This formulation enables continuous force evaluation and strictly prevents particle overlap while conserving total energy during translational and rotational motion. Simulations of polygonal and polyhedral particles confirm the framework's stability and demonstrate its capability to capture packing behavior, anisotropic diffusion, and equations of state. The framework establishes a robust and extensible foundation for investigating the nonequilibrium dynamics of complex nonspherical particle systems, with potential applications in colloidal self-assembly, granular flow, and hydrodynamics.

References in corpus (10)

• Robust Structural Identification via Polyhedral Template Matching
• Jammed Hard-Particle Packings: From Kepler to Bernal and Beyond
• The role of local structure in dynamical arrest
• Understanding shape entropy through local dense packing
• Brownian motion and the hydrodynamic friction tensor for colloidal particles of complex shape
• Digital Alchemy for Materials Design: Colloids and Beyond
• Relevance of Packing to Colloidal Self-Assembly
• GPU Accelerated Discrete Element Method (DEM) Molecular Dynamics for Conservative, Faceted Particle Simulations
• Decoupling of rotation and translation at the colloidal glass transition
• Optical assembly of nanostructures mediated by surface roughness