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A Voronoi Cell Material Point Method for Large Deformation Solid Mechanics
Problems

Article  in  Applied Mechanics and Materials · July 2016

DOI: 10.4028/www.scientific.net/AMM.846.108

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 A Voronoi cell material point method for large deformation solid
mechanics problems
Vinh Phu Nguyen1,a , and Giang Dinh Nguyen,1,b
School of Civil, Environmental and Mining Engineering, The University of Adelaide, Adelaide, SA
5005, Australia
a
phu.nguyen@adelaide.edu.au, b g.nguyen@adelaide.edu.au
Keywords: material point method (MPM), convected particle domain interpolation (CPDI), polygonal
particle domain, Voronoi diagrams, particle methods, Voronoi cell MPM (VC-MPM)

Abstract. Particle methods have been increasingly used in numerical simulations of complex prob-
lems in both sciences and engineering. A plethora of different particle methods exists of which the
material point method (MPM) is a promising method that is able to deal with high strain rate problems
that involve contact, impact, damage and fragmentation. Particle domains in the MPM are currently
represented by quadrilaterals in two dimensions. Extension to polygonal particle domains is presented
based on a simple sub-division of the polygons into sub-triangles. This allows MPM simulations to
be carried out for structures and materials discretized by Voronoi tessellations. Performances of the
proposed method are illustrated by means of numerical simulations.

Introduction
The Material Point Method (MPM) developed by Sulsky and co-workers is a hybrid particle-grid
method that combines the advantages of Eulerian and Lagrangian methods and hence is suitable for
solid mechanics problems involving contact, impact and large strains [1, 2]. In MPM, an Eulerian
background grid is used for calculation of derivatives and solving the momentum equation while the
material domain is represented by a set of material points or particles carrying history-dependent state
data. In its standard original formulation, the MPM describes particles as concentrated masses that
do not have spatial extents and hence suffers from instability issues when particles cross their cells.
Several approaches to overcoming these cell-crossing issues have been proposed, e.g., [3, 4], among
which the generalized interpolation material point (GIMP) [4] and its derivations seem to be the most
popular. GIMP uses a characteristic function to describe the finite extent domain of a particle and
hence can overcome cell-crossing instability issues in the original MPM. A recent development in
GIMP is the Convected Particle Domain Interpolation (CPDI) [5, 6] where the particle domains are
represented by quadrilaterals in two dimensions (2D). It has been numerically demonstrated that CPDI
can handle massive deformations that standard MPM and even GIMP cannot [5, 6].
In this study, we present a simple technique to extend CPDI to polygons in which a centroidal
Voronoi tessellation (CVT) is used to discretize the material. This CVT is a special type of Voronoi
diagrams, where the generating seed of each Voronoi cell is also its mean (center of mass with respect
to a given density function) [7]. Each particle is thus a Voronoi cell. The corresponding CPDI is dubbed
CPDI-Poly which is obtained simply by sub-dividing a cell into a number of triangles. Our motivation
is as follows. Since Voronoi cells appear in various problems such as drying muds, microstructures
of polycrystalline metals etc. the use of polygonal particle domains in such applications is a natural
choice. As a consequence, the use of polygonal finite elements have become more common e.g., [8].
Herein, technical details will be presented followed by a numerical example to verify the method with
existing CPDI formulation and demonstrate its performances in large deformation impact problems.

Convected particle domain interpolation

We refer to [4, 5, 6] for details on MPM. Herein we focus only on the interpolation. The interpolation
function of node I evaluated at particle p is written as
 L2 Q4
T3
1 2

L3

grid nodes
particles
particle nodes

Fig. 1: Different types of particle domains in CPDI.

∫
1
ϕIp = NI (x)dΩ, (1)
Vp
Ωp

where Vp and Ωp denote the particle volume1 and domain, respectively. The grid shape functions NI
are the standard Lagrangian shape functions used in FEM.
The basic idea of CPDI is to seek for a way to evaluate the integral in Eq.1 analytically. This can
be achieved by replacing NI by an interpolation of standard grid basis functions at the nodes of each
particle domain2 :
∑
n
NI (x) ≈ NIapp (x) = Mc (x)NI (xc ), (2)
c=1

where Mc (x) are the FE basis functions of the element used to represent the particle domain. The
original NI and alternative basis functions NIapp (x) differ from each other in the interior of the parti-
cle domain. However, the alternative basis function identically equals the exact basis function at the
particle corners and hence on the particle edges since Mc (x) are interpolation functions. This property
makes the CPDI evaluation of nodal internal forces exact in 1D. Different possibilities for the particle
domains in 1D and 2D are illustrated in Fig. 1.
The GIMP basis functions in Eq. 1 now becomes [6]

∫ ∫ [∑ n
]
1 1
ϕIp ≈ NIapp (x)dΩ ≈ Mc (x)NI (xc ) dΩ
Vp Vp c=1
Ωp Ωp
  (3)
∫
1 ∑ 1 ∑ c ∑
n n n

≈  M c (x)dΩ I c
N (x ) ≈ w̄ N (x
I c ) ≈ wfc NI (xc ),
Vp c=1 Vp c=1 f c=1
Ωp

where wfc are the function weights which can be obtained analytically, ∑
and w̄fc are the function weights
without being divided by the particle volume . It can be proved that c wfc = 1 due to the partition
3

of unity (PUM) of NI and thus the CPDI functions ϕI also form a PUM.
1
Or particle length in one dimension, particle area in two dimensions.
2
In the original article [6] only quadrilateral domains were presented and the term 'particle corners' were used. In our
work we present extension to particle domains with internal nodes.
3
This notation is introduced for the first time and it will be useful in the derivation of polygonal CPDI functions
 1 2 3 4 5

corners
grid nodes

particle

0.5

0
0 0.5 1 1.5 2 2.5 3 3.5 4
1

0.5

0
0 0.5 1 1.5 2 2.5 3 3.5 4

Fig. 2: One dimensional quadratic CPDI shape functions (bottom figure). Also shown are the standard
FE basis functions (middle figure) and the grid/particle (top figure).

The first derivatives of the CPDI functions are [6]

 
∑ ∫
1 ∑ c ∑
n n n
1  
∇ϕIp ≈  ∇Mc (x)dΩ NI (xc ) ≈ w̄ NI (xc ) ≈ wcg NI (xc ), (4)
Vp c=1
Vp c=1 g c=1
Ωp

in which wcf are the gradient weights which can be obtained analytically and w̄cg are the gradient
weights without being divided by the particle volume. We show in Fig. 2 a plot of one dimensional
quadratic CPDI functions to demonstrate that they form a PUM.
Triangular Convected Particle Domain Interpolation (CPDI-T3)
If the particles are represented by three-node triangular elements, the corresponding CPDI-T3 basis
functions and first derivatives are given by

1
ϕIp ≈ [NI (x1 ) + NI (x2 ) + NI (x3 )]
3 { [ ] [ ] [ ]} (5)
1 y2 − y3 y3 − y1 y1 − y2
∇ϕIp ≈ NI (x1 ) + NI (x2 ) + NI (x3 ) ,
2Vp x3 − x2 x1 − x3 x2 − x1

where w̄fc = Ap /3, c = 1, 2, 3 and Ap denotes the area of the particle triangle.

Polygonal CPDI

The idea is simple: the particle polygon of n sides (n ≥ 4) is partitioned into n triangles as shown in
Fig. 3. This allows us to rewrite the function ϕIp in Eq. 1:
  
∫ ∑
n ∫
1 1  
ϕIp = NI (x)dΩ =  NI (x)dΩ
Vp Vp s=1
Ωp Ωsp
  (6)
∫ [ 3 ]
1 ∑ 1 ∑ ∑ c
n n

≈  NI (x) dΩ ≈
app
w̄ NI (xc ) ,
Vp s=1 Vp s=1 c=1 f
Ωsp

where Ωsp denotes the sub-triangles and w̄fc are the function weights defined previously for the CPDI-
T3 case: w̄fc = As /3, c = 1, 2, 3, and As is the area of sub-triangle s.

particles sub-triangles

Fig. 3: CPDI-Poly: the particle polygon is subdivided into n triangles.

Equation 6 can be rewritten in the following general form which is equally applicable to any n-
sided polygons with n ≥ 4
∑
n+1
ϕIp ≈ wfc NI (xc ), (7)
c=1

1
∑ for example wf = (A1 /3 + A2 /3)/A, and A denotes the area of the particle domain i.e.,
in which
A = s As . Note that in our sub-sampling method in addition to the polygon vertices one needs to
use the polygon's centroid as well.
In the same manner, the derivatives are given by
 
∫ [ 3 ] n+1
1 ∑
n
  1 ∑n ∑ ∑
∇ϕIp ≈  ∇NI (x) dΩ ≈
app
w̄cg NI (xc ) ≈ wcg NI (xc ), (8)
Vp s=1 Vp s=1 c=1 c=1
Ωsp

with w̄cg being the unnormalized gradient weights, cf. Eq.5. For a pentagon (Fig. 3), one has
([ ] [ ])
1 0.5(y2 − y6 ) 0.5(y6 − y5 )
w1g = + , (9)
A 0.5(x6 − x2 ) 0.5(x5 − x6 )

where (xc , yc ) are the coordinates of particle node c. Similar expressions for other nodes can be ob-
tained.
Numerical examples

Due to limited space we present one numerical example to demonstrate the proposed method. Verifi-
cation tests are presented elsewhere4 [9]. The material is discretized into polygons using PolyMesher
[10] and the proposed formulation was implemented in an in-house MPM code written in Matlab.
Following [2], the problem of a hollow elastic disk impacting rigid walls as sketched in Fig. 4 is con-
sidered. Initially the disk is given a horizontal velocity of 20 m/s. The particles, its domain and the
Eulerian grid are shown in Figs. 5. The grid consists of 40 × 40 square elements and there are 950
particles or Voronoi cells. Real-time simulation is T = 0.01s and a constant time step of 1 × 10−6 s
was adopted. Impact between the disk and the walls is handled automatically by the intrinsic no-slip
contact capability of MPM. Simulation snapshots are given in Fig. 6.

Fig. 4: Impact of a hollow elastic disk with rigid walls.

Fixed background grid

Fig. 5: Impact of a hollow disk with rigid walls: background grid and polygonal particle domains.

Summary

We presented a simple but effective way to extend the convected particle domain interpolation method
in the framework of the material point method to cover the case of material point tessellation using
polygons of arbitrary sides. This extension can bring more flexibility in discretizing the structures/-
materials. It is also a natural choice for applications that exhibit features similar to Voronoi cells such
as grains of polycrystalline metals and drying muds. The framework was presented in its generic form
for 2D applications, but extension to polyhedral particle domains in 3D is straightforward.

Acknowledgements

Funding support from the Australian Research Council via projects DP140100945 (Giang D. Nguyen
and Vinh Phu Nguyen) and FT140100408 (Giang D. Nguyen) is gratefully acknowledged.
4
Where extreme deformation cases were considered and comparison with quadrilateral CPDI and MPM was studied.
 (a) (b)

(c) (d)

Fig. 6: Impact of a hollow elastic disk with rigid walls: some snapshots. First impact to the right wall
(a), bouning back (b), second impact to the left wall (c) and bouncing back again (d).

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