Kinematic Parcels vs Solid Particles
 

I've been working on a solver for colloidal particle flow based on the solidParticle class in OpenFOAM. There are a number of features that I have not implemented myself, but in looking over some of the classes and files in the lagrangian directory gives me hints that a lot of what I'd like to do is already built into OpenFOAM libraries. But in order to figure out how to use these I've got to be able to understand the comparison between the solidParticleCloud that I am using and the kinematicCloud that uses a lot of these things (collisions and injectors, specifically). Is the move() function in solidParticleCloud analogous to the evolve() function in the kinematicCloud class? What are these "Templates" classes listed under the lagrangian/intermediate/clouds/Templates directory? Are they simply meant to be a starting point for the construction of other classes? For instance, would it benefit me to work through the CollidingCloud template?

Have you already got the answers of your questions?

No answer?

Wow. Funny seeing this thread pop back up. It's been awhile, but I'll take a crack at answering my question of over two years ago. The kinematicParcel is primarily used as a parent class for various spray solvers. It is definitely the more comprehensive of the two, as it includes particle breakup inter-particle collisions, and many other features. I never did much delving into the class and everything it includes.

SolidParticle is a simpler class that is only meant to model particles that will remain solid and whole. I don't even think that it is used in any of the solver included in OpenFOAM. It includes an algorithm for wall-collision. I know it did not have an inter-particle collision algorithm, but I'm not sure if that's been added in more recent versions, or not.

For my thesis work (which I finally finished two years ago) I ended up just using the solidParticle class. The main reason for that was simplicity. There was less to keep track of, even if the class initially lacked some features that made using kinematicParcels somewhat attractive to me. If I were to do it all over again, I'm not sure which way I would have gone, but it might have been worth my time to learn how to use kinematicParcels instead. As things were I had to implement my own inter-particle collision algorithm. I also had my own simplified injection subroutine, though I'm not sure whether the injection models used in kinematicParcel would have worked for what I needed.