A new approach to detect the contact of two‐dimensional elliptical particles

The objective of this paper is to introduce a new algorithm to calculate analytically the overlap of two‐dimensional ellipses. The algorithm may be applied for the direct numerical simulation of granular material dynamics by the discrete element method (DEM). The stability of the algorithm is analysed. Moreover, optimization for possible iterative methods is dealt with. Copyright © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.