yade-users team mailing list archive

[liukeqi <question404284@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

New question #404284 on Yade:
https://answers.launchpad.net/yade/+question/404284

Hi, everyone

   I want to know the purpose that using periodic boundary in the simulation.

   I search the meaning of "periodic boundary condition" and get the definition as following in Wikipedia[1].
“Periodic boundary conditions (PBCs) are a set of boundary conditions which are often chosen for approximating a large (infinite) system by using a small part called a unit cell. The large systems approximated by PBCs consist of an infinite number of unit cells. In computer simulations, one of these is the original simulation box, and others are copies called images. During the simulation, only the properties of the original simulation box need to be recorded and propagated. The minimum-image convention is a common form of PBC particle bookkeeping in which each individual particle in the simulation interacts with the closest image of the remaining particles in the system."

  I do not really understand its meaning. As far as I understand, if a simulation sample has cube or rectangular prism boundary and its loading manner is homogeneous in the boundary, but it has too many particles to compute, then in order to improve efficiency in computation, we can use the periodic boundary which size  is proportional small to the original simulation sample and loading manner is similar to original simulation boundary. Because through using periodic boundary, we can using a small number of particles to get almost the same result as the original simulation do. 

Do I have some misunderstandings about it?

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Periodic_boundary_conditions

Thank you.

Liu

-- 
You received this question notification because your team yade-users is
an answer contact for Yade.