Section: Software and Platforms

MECHE: Simulation of fibrous materials

Participants : Florence Bertails-Descoubes, Alexandre Derouet-Jourdan, Romain Casati, Laurence Boissieux.

The software MECHE was essentially developed during the MECHE ADT (2009-2011), for simulating the dynamics of assemblies of thin rods (such as hair), subject to contact and friction. Currently, this software is extensively used by two PhD students (A. Derouet-Jourdan and R. Casati) and continues to be enriched with new rod models and inversion modules. This software combines a panel of well-accepted models for rods (ranging from reduced coordinates to maximal coordinates models, and including models recently developed by some members of the group) with classical as well as innovative schemes for solving the problem of frictional contact (incorporating the most recent results of the group, as well as the new contact solver we published in [8] ). The aim of this software is twofold: first, to compare and analyze the performance of nonsmooth schemes for the frictional contact problem, in terms of realism (capture of dry friction, typically), robustness, and computational efficiency. A first study of this kind was conducted in 2010-2011 onto the different rod models that were available in the software. New studies are planned for evaluating further rod models. Second, we believe such a software will help us understand the behavior of a fibrous material (such as hair) through virtual experiments, thanks to which we hope to identify and understand some important emergent phenomena. A careful validation study against experiments started to be conducted in 2011 in collaboration with physicists from L'Oréal. Once this discrete elements model will be fully validated, our ultimate goal would be to build a continuous macroscopic model for the hair medium relying on nonsmooth laws. The core of this software was transferred to L'Oréal in 2011.