(364b) DEM Simulation with Scaled-up Particles

After the pioneering work by Professor Tsuji, DEM and DEM-CFD coupling model became a major modelling method for particulate systems. There are many advantages to use DEM over the continuum model; individual particle information can be accessed, particle shape effects can be considered and inter-particle interaction forces can be included, to name a few. On the other hand, one of the existing challenges in DEM is the high computational cost. The massive advances in computational power over the past decades made it possible to simulate millions to billions of particles within a reasonable time. However, this can only be less than a spoonful of particles if using small particles and it is still practically impossible to perform industrial scale simulations. To overcome this problem, several researchers have proposed scaled-up particle models in literature, which is also referred to as coarse grain or similarity models, where the particle size is increased artificially to reduce the number of particles which can significantly speed-up the computation. The present work discusses the recent developments of scaled-up particle models and their effectiveness.