CFD-DEM model

A CFD-DEM model is suitable for the modeling or simulation of fluid-solids or fluid-particles systems. In a typical CFD-DEM model, the phase motion of discrete solids or particles is obtained by the Discrete Element Method (DEM) which applies Newton's laws of motion to every particle^[1] and the flow of continuum fluid is described by the local averaged Navier–Stokes equations that can be solved by the traditional Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD).^[2] The model is first proposed by Tsuji et al.^[3][4] The interactions between the fluid phase and solids phase is better modeled according to Newton's third law.^[5]

Software

Open source and non-commercial software:

• The open source CFD software OpenFOAM includes particle methods, including DEM, and solvers that couple CFD-DEM.
• CFDEMcoupling (DCS Computing GmbH) couples CFD from OpenFOAM with open source DEM software, LIGGGHTS.
• MFiX(Open Source multiphase flow simulation package).
• The commercial software Simcenter STAR-CCM+ is an integrated multiphysics solution capable of CFD-DEM coupling involving single or multiphase flow, chemical reactions, electromagnetism and heat transfer

Parallelization

OpenMP has been shown to be more efficient in performing coupled CFD-DEM calculations in parallel framework as compared to MPI by Amritkar et al.^[6]