By means of contact dynamics simulations, we investigate a dense packing composed of polyhedral particles under quasistatic shearing. The effect of particle shape is analyzed by comparing the polyhedra packing with a packing of similar characteristics except for the spherical shape of the particles. The polyhedra packing shows higher shear stress and dilatancy but similar stress-dilatancy relat...

This work proposes an algorithm for computing dense packings of congruent circles inside general 2D containers. Unlike the previous approaches which accept as containers, only simple, symmetric shapes such as circles, rectangles and triangles, our method works for any container with a general, freeform (spline) boundary. In contrast to most previous approaches which cast the problem into a non-...

We systematically study the relationship between equilibrium and nonequilibrium phase diagrams of a system of short-ranged attractive colloids. Using Monte Carlo and Brownian dynamics simulations we find a window of enhanced crystallization that is limited at high interaction strength by a slowing down of the dynamics and at low interaction strength by the high nucleation barrier. We find that ...

We perform extensive molecular dynamics simulations of dense liquids composed of bidisperse dimer- and ellipse-shaped particles in two dimensions that interact via purely repulsive contact forces. We measure the structural relaxation times obtained from the long-time α decay of the self part of the intermediate scattering function for the translational and rotational degrees of freedom (DOF) as...

The packing problem of long thin filaments that are injected into confined spaces is of fundamental interest for physicists and biologists alike. How linear threads pack and coil is well known only for the ideal case of rigid containers, though. Here, we force long elastic rods into flexible spatial confinement borne by an elastic shell to examine under which conditions recently acquired knowle...

The athermal and dissipative nature of packings of grains is still challenging our understanding of their compaction as well as their crystallisation. For instance, some beads poured in a container get jammed in random disordered con gurations, which cannot be denser than 64%, the random closed packing (RCP) limit. Remarkably it has been suggested that the RCP bound is saturated with dense patt...

Simulation of small molecules, polymers, and proteins in dense solvents is an important class of problems both for processing of materials in liquids and for simulation of proteins in physiologically relevent solvent states. However, these simulations are expensive and sampling is inefficient due to the ubiquitous dense solvent. Even in the absence of the dense solvent, rigorous sampling of the...

We report on experiments to measure the temporal and spatial evolution of packing arrangements of anisotropic and weakly confined granular material, using high-resolution gamma-ray adsorption. In these experiments, the particle configurations start from an initially disordered, low-packing-fraction state and under vertical solicitations evolve to a dense state. We find that the packing fraction...

This paper addresses the equal circle packing problem, and proposes an efficient quasi-physical algorithm(EQPA). EQPA is based on an improved BFGS algorithm and a new basin hopping strategy. Starting form a random initial pattern, we use the modified BFGS algorithm to reach a local minimum pattern. The modified BFGS algorithm fully utilizes the neighborhood information and considerably speeds u...

We investigate the mechanics of dense packing of very small, colloidal-scale, and larger, granular-scale microgel particles. At low particle concentration, thermally induced Brownian motion of the particles is important for the colloidal-scale systems; in contrast, such Brownian motion is irrelevant at particle packing fractions beyond jamming. As a consequence, colloidal and granular systems b...