Eddy, Cardiff sliding Dinosaur

Eddy is held by the tails and gravity acts in direction [1 -1] in the plane of the picture. The dinosaur will either slip or stumble forward depending on the roughness of the contact between its feet and the support.

Eddy is not meshed. Instead, the .stl file that describes its boundary is converted into a continuous level-set, whose negative values indicate eddies spatial occupancy. The zero isoline can cut arbitrarily through the elements.

The simulations were performed using the CutFEM FEniCS library.
 
S. Claus & P. Kerfriden, A stable and optimally convergent LaTIn-Cut Finite Element Method for multiple unilateral contact problems, IJNME, 2017
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/nme.5694

Burman, E., Claus, S., Hansbo, P., Larson, M. G., and Massing, A. (2015) CutFEM: Discretizing geometry and partial differential equations. Int. J. Numer. Meth. Engng, 104: 472–501. doi: 10.1002/nme.4823.

The 3D dinosaur model was created by ThinkerThing: http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:343924