PeriDEM

PeriDEM couples peridynamics with a discrete-element method so that granular media can be simulated as what they are: assemblies of deformable, arbitrarily shaped particles that fracture under load.

Classical DEM treats particles as rigid or nearly rigid, which fixes the contact law and forecloses intra-particle damage. Here each particle is a peridynamic solid, and contact forces act at the level of that discretization, so locking between complex shapes, load transmission through force chains, and fracture inside a grain all emerge rather than being prescribed.

Written in C++ with Taskflow, VTK, Gmsh and METIS; multithreaded, with a modular branch under active development. Published in JMPS (2021) and as a software paper in JOSS (2025), both single-authored.

It is the computational basis for the NSF ERI work on adaptive multi-fidelity modeling: deciding which grains genuinely need the expensive description.