High-Resolution Modelling of Axisymmetric Granular Column Collapse Using Parallelized SPH

Abstract

AbstractGranular flows are relevant to a variety of engineering applications from risk management of natural phenomena such as landslides and rock avalanches, to flow of pills in the pharmaceutical industry. The granular column collapse is an important experiment to study because of the exhibition of both solid and fluid-like behaviours of granular material. Here we present the continuum simulation of axisymmetric granular column collapse for aspect ratios up to 30 by using two constitutive relations: an elasto-plastic model with Drucker-Prager yield criterion, and the \(\mu \left(I\right)\) rheological model for dense granular flows. Both models are implemented into a Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH) code parallelised for CPU clusters with thousands of cores. While very good agreement with experimental data has been reported for both models for small and intermediate aspect ratios, the large-scale simulations conducted for large aspect ratios show that the Drucker-Prager model tends to over-predict final deposit height, and the (I) model under-predicts it. The differences in flow behaviour and final deposit morphology appear to be largely due to the different volumetric behaviour of the models, as well as the rate independence of the elasto-plastic approach whereas the \(\mu \left(I\right)\) model is rate dependent.KeywordsSmoothed particle hydrodynamicsGranular flowGeomaterialGranular column collapse