Modeling of Adhesive Particles Using a Combination of the Two-Body Interaction and Phase-Field Methods

Discrete materials such as powders and granular materials have been widely used due to their specific characteristics. The precise evaluation is accordingly becoming important, and various numerical schemes have been developed. However, the interactions among the constituent particles are still difficult to model precisely. Especially, contact conditions, which vary with material properties and circumstances, are difficult to formulate. In this study, a computational model for simulating adhesive particles on contact in a many-particle system is proposed. The interaction between the particles was represented by a two-body repulsive force that depends on the distance between particles and an additional adhesive force at the contact point. A phase-field variable was introduced to express the surface of each particle, and the adhesive force was formulated using the phase-field distribution. As a result, the adhesion of particles was properly expressed. For a mono-particle system, neighboring particles adhered and uniformly aggregated, while for a dual-particle system, several characteristic patterns were obtained depending on the initial arrangement of the particles. Repulsive contact was also considered as a specific case, and the corresponding results were obtained.