Event driven algorithms applied to a high energy ball mill simulation

In the physics community, event driven molecular dynamics simulations have been successfully applied to typical physical topics, such as granular gases. In contrast, in the engineering sciences, event driven algorithms have not become as popular, even though they can be far more efficient for special systems. In this paper, we present an event driven simulation of a high energy ball mill, where the motion and energy transfer of the grinding balls during operation are simulated. Stable numerical algorithms for collision detection and collision response are developed and several possible pitfalls are discussed. Furthermore, an improved event list handling technique and a specialized space subdivision method is presented. The performance of the partitioning is demonstrated by experiments. It is shown that the scaling rules usually applied are oversimplified. A new way of scaling the process parameters to obtain a higher production yield using iso-impact diagrams is presented.