CHS: Small: Efficient Simulation of Thin Materials With Discrete Tension Field Theory

University Of Texas At Austin, Austin TX

Investigators

Abstract

Thin shell simulations are a foundational tool in scientific computing. They are used to analyze the behavior of biological structures such as vesicles and cell membranes, to simulate deformation of fabrics and composites, to predict scarring and wrinkling of skin in surgery training and visualization tools, and to analyze buckling and crumpling of structural elements in buildings and vehicles. This research will establish new algorithms for simulating the physical behavior of thin curved materials such as fabric, paper, or sheet metal, with unprecedented efficiency, whereas such simulations currently are notoriously difficult and computationally expensive because thin objects like a sheet of paper or cloth bend far more readily than they stretch and will prefer to buckle and crumple in geometrically complex ways rather than compress. Moreover, this complexity is unpredictable and chaotic; the exact pattern of wrinkles can vary wildly even for identical objects under identical loads. Finally, predicting how a thin object behaves under frictional contact with itself and the environment is especially challenging; due to the thin geometry, expensive collision detection and response algorithms must be used to ensure that thin parts do not tunnel through each other, no matter how quickly or forcefully they are pushed together. To make thin material simulations more practical for use in engineering, design, and robotics applications, where performance is critical, this project will develop a more efficient, simplified model for how to simulate deformation of thin materials. The key insight, borrowed from the tension field approach in continuum mechanics, is that the behavior of thin objects is dominated by lines of tension through the material, while fine-scale wrinkles induced by compression and bending are extraordinarily expensive to resolve yet contribute little to the object's coarse-scale shape or mechanical behavior. By exploiting this insight and focusing computational effort on tracking and simulating the lines of tension, the performance of thin shell simulations can be substantially improved without sacrificing accuracy. Put another way, in regions of pure tension the elastic membrane energy is convex and standard shell finite element methods perform well. Whereas in regions of pure compression, or mixed tension and compression, buckling occurs since there is a scale separation between the resistance of thin materials to compression and to bending, and the post-buckled state of the shell contains many highly nonlinear, complex wrinkles and creases, yet the coarse shape of the shell can nevertheless be approximated by ignoring the wrinkles and treating the shell as a collection of 1D curves aligned to the tensile stress directions on the shell. The detailed work plan will comprise work on tension-dominated surfaces, mixed-stress surfaces, and contact and friction. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.