Abstract
In this work, we present an alternative methodology to solve the particle-fluid interaction in the resolved CFDEM ® coupling framework. This numerical approach consists of coupling a Discrete Element Method (DEM) with a Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) scheme, solving the motion of immersed particles in a fluid phase. As a novelty, our approach explicitly accounts for the body force acting on the fluid phase when computing the local momentum balance equations. Accordingly, we implement a fluid-particle interaction computing the buoyant and drag forces as a function of local shear strain and pressure gradient. As a benchmark, we study the Stokesian limit of a single particle. The validation is performed comparing our outcomes with the ones provided by a previous resolved methodology and the analytical prediction. In general, we find that the new implementation reproduces with very good accuracy the Stokesian dynamics. Complementarily, we study the settling terminal velocity of a sphere under confined conditions.
Highlights
In our approach, the gravitational field is directly included in the incompressible Navier-Stokes equation as aThe recent advances in particle-fluid simulations allowed the description of many industrial and natural processes [1,2,3,4]
Note that the cfdemSolverIB approach (Fig. 1a) does not account for the pressure gradient imposed by the external field in the fluid
Remark that when using cfdemSolverIB, the local pressure field is solely defined by the corresponding variations in the velocity field, as a result of the momentum balance equations
Summary
The gravitational field is directly included in the incompressible Navier-Stokes equation as aThe recent advances in particle-fluid simulations allowed the description of many industrial and natural processes [1,2,3,4]. Experimental and simulated data agreed very well when exploring intermediate Reynolds number regimes. It suggests that the CFD-DEM coupling can resolve the hydrodynamics interactions in those scales with enough accuracy. When examining simulation domains that are much larger than the dimensions of the particle, unresolved methods are typically applied. In these methods, the local interactions are determined by auxiliary fields, which represent the particles in the CFD domain. Not relevant differences will be expected when a single particle is analyzed, such differences might be relevant for very dense suspensions where the local pressure varies due to the dynamical coupling between particles
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