Keywords: quasicontinuum method, discrete particle model.

The quasicontinuum (QC) method is a relatively new computational technique, which combines continuum and atomistic approaches. The key idea is to cut down the computational cost by reducing the number of degrees of freedom (DOFs) of the fully atomistic approach. Instead of treating all atoms as independent, a small subset of atoms is carefully selected to represent the whole system. The selected atoms, called the repatoms, are used to approximate the DOFs of other atoms. This technique was originally proposed for regular atomistic lattices. In the present work, a similar technique is applied to an irregular set of particles representing a heterogeneous material. The paper describes three QC-inspired approaches that can approximate a discrete particle model with particles connected by elastic links. All of them have been implemented in OOFEM. Accuracy, efficiency and specific properties of all simplified approaches based on the idea of QC are evaluated by comparison of the results obtained by three-dimensional simulations of a tensile test with the fully resolved particle model.

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