Infinite FEA elements

Hello,

please read [1] and provide more information
- do you have any reference / example to "infinite finite element"?
- does wall suit your needs? why not?
- what is "the DEM boundaries"? what is "infinite medium"?
- ...

Cheers
Jan

[1] https://www.yade-dem.org/wiki/Howtoask

My apologies. I should have been more clear.

I am running a hydraulic fracture model using YADE. The model is a square domain (2D) which is filled with spheres. I am now contemplating on what to do with the boarder edges. One option is to keep them free, but this causes rigid body motion. Another option is to pin the spheres at the edges, but the model size has to be very large for the edge not to interfere with the crack.
One option is to implement infinite FEA elements on the edge to model a infinite domain. I was wondering if YADE has this capability or if anyone in the community had done this.

All I want is the edge spheres to experience a reaction force, during deformation, as if the domain is infinite.

You mean periodic boundary conditions? [1]

[1] https://yade-dem.org/doc/formulation.html#periodic-boundary-conditions

Apart from periodic boundary conditions, you can:

- use wall [1,2] as a boundary element
- fix some boundary particles (possibly with lowering their stiffness?)
- ...

Any of the solution is perfect, of course. Try and choose with least influence your expectations w.r.t truly infinite case :-)

Cheers
Jan

[1] https://yade-dem.org/doc/yade.utils.html#yade.utils.wall
[2] https://yade-dem.org/doc/yade.wrapper.html#yade.wrapper.Wall