Calibration of micromechanical parameters for DEM simulations by using the particle filter

The calibration of DEM models is typically accomplished by trail and error. However, the procedure lacks of objectivity and has several uncertainties. To deal with these issues, the particle filter is employed as a novel approach to calibrate DEM models of granular soils. The posterior probability distribution of the microparameters that give numerical results in good agreement with the experimental response of a Toyoura sand specimen is approximated by independent model trajectories, referred as ‘particles’, based on Monte Carlo sampling. The soil specimen is modeled by polydisperse packings with different numbers of spherical grains. Prepared in ‘stress-free’ states, the packings are subjected to triaxial quasistatic loading. Given the experimental data, the posterior probability distribution is incrementally updated, until convergence is reached. The resulting ‘particles’ with higher weights are identified as the calibration results. The evolutions of the weighted averages and posterior probability distribution of the micro-parameters are plotted to show the advantage of using a particle filter, i.e., multiple solutions are identified for each parameter with known probabilities of reproducing the experimental response.