Analysis of force networks in jammed deformable particles

Understanding how forces propagate through jammed granular materials can provide vital insights into their evolving elastic properties, particularly in response to external stress. Studying the onset of jamming in granular materials, which is marked by the onset of rigidity, is of particular interest because changes in motility are important in understanding phenomena such as cancer metastasis. Force propagation during jamming onset has been previously characterized in linearly elastic granular materials. However, the additional complexities of modeling soft particles with shape degrees of freedom, such as cells or other very soft granular materials, changes the force propagation dynamics. Thus, it is necessary to develop models specifically to characterize the force networks constraining these soft particle systems. In this work, we characterize force chains in granular packings of deformable particles, and their evolution at the jamming onset using the deformable particle model (DPM), as described in Boromond et al. (2018). We implement our simulations in HOOMD-blue, an open source particle simulation toolkit. Our implementation and analysis will lead to better understanding of the jamming onset of deformable granular packings, which can contribute to applications related to cell motility such as better cancer prognostics or wound healing.