FrictionalMonolith: A Monolithic Optimization-based Approach for Granular Flow with Contact-Aware Rigid-Body Coupling

Abstract

We propose FrictionalMonolith, a monolithic pressure-friction-contact solver for more accurately, robustly, and efficiently simulating two-way interactions of rigid bodies with continuum granular materials or inviscid liquids. By carefully formulating the components of such systems within a single unified minimization problem, our solver can simultaneously handle unilateral incompressibility and implicit integration of friction for the interior of the continuum, frictional contact resolution among the rigid bodies, and mutual force exchanges between the continuum and rigid bodies. Our monolithic approach eliminates various problematic artifacts in existing weakly coupled approaches, including loss of volume in the continuum material, artificial drift and slip of the continuum at solid boundaries, interpenetrations of rigid bodies, and simulation instabilities. To efficiently handle this challenging monolithic minimization problem, we present a customized solver for the resulting quadratically constrained quadratic program that combines elements of staggered projections, augmented Lagrangian methods, inexact projected Newton, and active-set methods. We demonstrate the critical importance of a unified treatment and the effectiveness of our proposed solver in a range of practical scenarios.