Material point method
The Material Point Method, also referred to as the Particle-in-cell (PIC) Method, is a Finite element method (FEM)-based particle method. It is primarily used for multiphase simulations, because of the ease of detecting contact. It can also be used as an alternative to dynamic FEM methods to simulate large material deformations, because there is no remeshing required by MPM.
In MPM, Eulerian point masses, or particles, are moved through a Lagrangian mesh. At the end of each calculation cycle, a ‘convective’ step occurs, in which the mesh is reset to its original position, while particles remain in their current positions.
History of PIC/MPM
PIC was originally conceived to solve problems in fluid dynamics, and developed by Harlow at Los Alamos Laboratories in 1957 [1].
Notes
- ^ Johnson, N.L., (1996), The legacy and future of computational fluid dynamics at Los Alamos, In Proceedings of the 1996 Canadian CFD Conference