Individual Particle Tracking

Theo_Score's picture
Submitted by Theo_Score on Fri, 06/03/2016 - 04:39

Hi All,

I am simulating granular flow on a conveyor belt. Is there a way of tracking individual particle position, forces, velocities per time step or through out the simulation run.

Theo_Score

richti83's picture

richti83 | Fri, 06/03/2016 - 08:56

you can use a Threashold filter by ParticleID in ParaView and than plot the result over time.

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Laure's picture

Laure | Fri, 06/03/2016 - 15:30

In the code, you can use dump to output particle positions and other properties, by setting up a group, you can dump a selection of particles. Read the doc for more details: http://www.cfdem.com/media/DEM/docu/Section_commands.html#cmd_5

Simplified personal example:
# defines a region in the simulation.
region reg90 block 0 0.5 0.2 0.6 0 0.5 units box
# index all particles in that region, particles will stay in that group even if they leave the region.
group group90 region reg90
# outputs properties of each atom in the group every 500 timesteps (extra properties can be added)
dump dump1 group90 custom 500 dump.*.packing id type x y z radius vx vy vz fx fy fz omegax omegay omegaz

The dump file can be changed to .vtk files and used in Paraview.

You might want to check out ave/time and ave/spatial which will produce simple files with timestep and the values you want. It's easier to post-process in Matlab.