This paper presents a new method for detecting contact between polygonal particles in the beam‐particle model. The main objective is to propose a robust and efficient algorithm capable of efficiently detecting contact between particles and increasing accuracy when complex particle shapes are used. This newly developed algorithm is based on a multi‐circle approach, where a set of circles is used to describe the shape of each particle. To validate and verify the algorithm, the developed approach is compared to the polygonal approach and to analytical results. For this purpose, several examples dealing with contact problems were performed. The obtained results show that the proposed contact detection procedure has the potential to efficiently detect the contact between two‐dimensional particles of complex shapes and provides a faster way to detect contact compared to the polygonal approach.