Is it possible to use unstructured mesh in OpenFOAM to perform fluid-solid coupling with Liggghts in CFDEM?

Submitted by keepfit on Sun, 08/12/2012 - 21:17

Hallo Christoph,

I was wondering, in order to generate a complex CFD geometry such as ship cull, propeller, is it possible to use unstructured instead of structured mesh in OpenFOAM while coulping with LIGGGHTS?

Thanks in advance.

David Long

Forums:

alice's picture

alice | Tue, 08/14/2012 - 18:31

Hello David,
yes, it is possible to use arbitrary geometries. For the CFD calculation you only have to convert the given mesh to an OpenFoam mesh. On the DEM side you have to load stl files and load them as granular wall.
Cheers,
Alice

keepfit | Thu, 08/16/2012 - 15:09

hi Alice,

thanks very much for your reply. If i understood correctly

1) DEM (LIGGGHTS) and OpenFOAM share with the same complex mesh, including boundaries and object geometry

2) but for a simple fluid domain, e.g. a cube or a combination of primitives which is easy defined in both OpenFOAM and DEM. In this case, should we just define the boundaries condition, i.e. walls in LIGGGHTS?

regards,

Daivd

alice's picture

alice | Thu, 08/16/2012 - 16:43

Hi David,
basically you define the domains for DEM and CFD seperately. As you pointed out, for simple cases (cubes, etc...) you can set up the geometry in LIGGGHTS directly (primitives, xwall, ...) and create a CFD-mesh with blockMesh.
For more complex cases I usually generate a 3D mesh for the CFD computation and convert it to an stl-file (surfaceMeshTriangulate can do that, have a look at its descripton...) which can be used as wall in the LIGGGHTS-in-file.
Cheers,
Alice

Arghavani | Wed, 11/27/2019 - 13:53

Hi every one ,
I would like to know is it possible to do cfdemSolverIB for unstructured mesh namely using semi cylinder(STL file , using snappyHexMesh ) inside a background domain ?
kind regards,
Arghavan