Thanks to its general design, PFC can be customized and applied to a very broad range of numerical investigations where the discrete nature of the systems is of interest. Since the release of the first version in 1994, PFC has been successfully used by many academic institutions and private companies around the world for geoscience investigations ranging from fundamental research on soil and rock behavior at the micro scale to many large scale applications, including:
- slope stability analysis,
- rockfall hazard mitigation,
- cave mining,
- salt dome deformation,
- sink hole formation,
- hydraulic fracturing,
- wave propagation in solids,
- volcanic dome emplacement,
- structural geology,
- mine backfill,
- brittle rock fracturing,
- concrete and asphalt modeling, and
- soil-tool interactions.
PFC has also been used extensively for material process engineering problems such as:
- bulk material flow mixing,
- bulk material conveying,
- compaction of aggregates and powders, and
- blast furnace modeling.
Well beyond the geosciences and process engineering, PFC has also been utilized to simulate the:
- mechanical response of carbon nanotubes,
- molecular dynamics simulations of Lennard -Jones materials,
- the collective behavior of heart cells contracting,
- extrusion of adhesive materials through nozzles (i.e., 3D printing), and
- the interactions of magnetic materials, amongst others.