Is it possible to simulate non-spherical particles with the community edition

Submitted by joh96 on Fri, 09/11/2015 - 00:05

Hi,

I'm looking for an open source / free DEM software for simulating the packaging process of a packed bed reactor. I need to calculate the voidage fraction of the resulting packed bed.

The bed consists of spherical and cylindrical particles of different sizes. I could not find this information in the documentation so I'm going to ask here: Is liggghts capable of running a simulation similar to this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C3uTXLfkY-Q

I know that only the premium version provides full resolved non-spherical particles but is it possible with public version (friction models) to simulate my case? If so are there any build in funtions to calculate the voidage fraction in a controll volume?

Best regards
Johannes

JoshuaP | Tue, 09/15/2015 - 11:56

for cylindrical particles u could simply try to cump 2 or more particles together to get kind of cylindrical shaped particles

Daniel Queteschiner | Tue, 09/15/2015 - 13:26

In short: no.
In the public version you can only use simple spherical particles for granular simulations.
There is the atom style 'ellipsoid' but there's no granular contact model implemented for that shape.
There is also the fix rigid command that can treat one or more sets of atoms as independent rigid bodies but the implementation is not up to scratch.

ckloss's picture

ckloss | Thu, 09/24/2015 - 09:41

Hi Johannes,

a serial version of the multisphere method has just been released

Christoph