Smoothed Polyhedral DEM Model Based on Minkowski Sum Algorithm

In recent years, an increasing number of numerical studies have focused on the actual morphology of particles (Nie et al. in Int J Solids Struct 202:1–11, 2020), and DEMs have been developed for arbitrarily shaped particles (Jha et al. in J Mech Phys Solids 151, 2021; Gui et al. in Appl Math Model 40:2485–2499, 2016; Kafashan et al. in Granular Matter 21:1–19, 2019). Ellipsoidal and super-ellipsoidal models are mathematical formulations for constructing non-spherical particles (Zhao et al. in Int J Solids Struct 150:268–281, 2018), and ellipsoidal, cylindrical, and cubic particles with various aspect ratios and sharp surfaces are obtained by varying the function parameters (Kildashti et al. in Comput Methods Appl Mech Eng 360, 2020).