Abstract
In engineering equipment such as fluidized bed and spouted bed, dense particles strongly interact with each other and surrounding carrier flows. The coupling scheme between Discrete Element Method (DEM) and Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) is meritorious for the simulation of such flows. However, this approach needs to solve the equations of motion of all individual particles which account for many-body contacts and fluid forces exerting on particles, as well as the simultaneous computation of the motion of fluid flow. Consequently, it requires huge amounts of computation time and hence the applications of this scheme have been restricted to a small-scale system. In this paper, in order to conduct a large-scale simulation, hopefully in actual engineering equipment scale, DEM-CFD coupling scheme is parallelized on a commodity PC-cluster parallel computer. By using 1-D domain decomposition technique, fairly good scalability is obtained. We have succeeded to simulate a system composed of millions of particles.
