A Bonded-Particle Discrete-Element Model with Self-Gravity for the Collision and Reaccumulation of Rubble-Pile Asteroids: Formulation and Numerical Protocol
Abstract
I present a discrete-element approach developed to study the collisional and gravitational evolution of small self-gravitating granular aggregates. Each body is represented as a composite of cohesively bonded spherical grains, so that fragmentation and reaccumulation emerge from the microscopic competition between short-range dissipative contact forces, an irreversible bond-breaking criterion, and pairwise Newtonian self-gravity summed over every particle pair, including those internal to a single body. A numerical experiment is described: a random-sequential packing procedure that generates two bonded spherical aggregates, a controlled two-body encounter with tunable approach speed and impact parameter, and a systematic parameter sweep designed to map the conditions under which two bodies launched from rest under their mutual gravity alone either merge into a single remnant or fail to settle after a low-speed encounter. Of the 125 simulated collisions, 56.8\% result in the formation of a single residue. The cohesive network remains intact for Πσ≲0.036, is partially damaged with dispersion determined by the contact damping ratio, and breaks completely for Πσ≈3.59
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BibTeX
@misc{trivino2026bondedparticle,
title = {{A Bonded-Particle Discrete-Element Model with Self-Gravity for the Collision and Reaccumulation of Rubble-Pile Asteroids: Formulation and Numerical Protocol}},
author = {Yohann Trivino},
howpublished = {arXiv},
year = {2026},
month = sep,
doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2609.30903},
eprint = {2609.30903},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.30903},
note = {CC BY 4.0},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - A Bonded-Particle Discrete-Element Model with Self-Gravity for the Collision and Reaccumulation of Rubble-Pile Asteroids: Formulation and Numerical Protocol
AU - Yohann Trivino
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/09/25
PB - arXiv
DO - 10.48550/arxiv.2609.30903
UR - https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.30903
AB - I present a discrete-element approach developed to study the collisional and gravitational evolution of small self-gravitating granular aggregates. Each body is represented as a composite of cohesively bonded spherical grains, so that fragmentation and reaccumulation emerge from the microscopic competition between short-range dissipative contact forces, an irreversible bond-breaking criterion, and pairwise Newtonian self-gravity summed over every particle pair, including those internal to a single body. A numerical experiment is described: a random-sequential packing procedure that generates two bonded spherical aggregates, a controlled two-body encounter with tunable approach speed and impact parameter, and a systematic parameter sweep designed to map the conditions under which two bodies launched from rest under their mutual gravity alone either merge into a single remnant or fail to settle after a low-speed encounter. Of the 125 simulated collisions, 56.8\% result in the formation of a single residue. The cohesive network remains intact for Π_σ≲0.036, is partially damaged with dispersion determined by the contact damping ratio, and breaks completely for Π_σ≈3.59
ER -