Geology

CFD-DEM

Mathematics

Mechanics

Computer science

Smoothed-particle hydrodynamics

Free surface

Multiphase flow

Flow (mathematics)

Fluid simulation

Oceanography

Engineering

Mechanical engineering

Fluid dynamics

Computational science

Scalability

Two-phase flow

Discrete element method

Grid

Geometry

Particle (ecology)

Coupling (piping)

Simulation

Database

Physics

Powder Technology

Particle-fluid flows with free-surfaces are commonly encountered in many industrial processes, such as wet ball milling, slurry transport and mixing. Accurate prediction of particle behaviors in these systems is critical to establish fundamental understandings of the processes, however the presence of the free-surface makes modelling them a challenge for most traditional, continuum, multi-phase methodologies. Coupling of smoothed particle hydrodynamics and discrete element method (SPH-DEM) has the potential to be an effective numerical method to achieve this goal. However, practical application of this method remains challenging due to high computational demands. In this work, a general purposed SPH-DEM model that runs entirely on a Graphic Processing Unit (GPU) is developed to accelerate the simulation. Fluid-solid coupling is based on local averaging techniques and, to accelerate neighbor searching, a dual-grid searching approach is adapted to a GPU architecture to tackle the size difference in the searchin...

A GPU-based coupled SPH-DEM method for particle-fluid flow with free surfaces