SUMMARY

This study extends a recently-developed cellular automata (CA) elastodynamic modeling approach to arbitrary two-dimensional geometries through development of a rule set appropriate for triangular cells. The approach is fully object-oriented (OO) and exploits OO conventions to produce compact, general, and easily-extended CA classes. Meshes composed of triangular cells allow the elastodynamic response of arbitrary two-dimensional geometries to be computed accurately and efficiently. As in the previous rectangular CA method, each cell represents a state machine which updates in a stepped-manner using a local “bottom-up” rule set and state input from neighboring cells. The approach avoids the need to develop partial differential equations and the complexity therein, and owing to its discrete nature, can be considered to belong in the category of particle methods. Several advantages result from the method’s discrete, local and object-oriented nature, including the ability to compute on a massively-parallel basis and to easily add or subtract cells in a multi-resolution manner. The extended approach is used to generate the elastodynamic responses of a variety of general geometries and loading cases (Dirichlet and Nuemann), which are compared to previous results and/or comparison results generated using the commercial finite element code, COMSOL. These include harmonic interior plate loading, uniform boundary traction, and ramped boundary displacement. Favorable results are reported in all cases, with the CA approach requiring fewer degrees of freedom to achieve similar accuracy, and considerably less code development.