Stainless steel balls with icoUncoupledKinematicParcelFoam ?
 

Hi all,

Just for fun I had a look at the hopper tutorial of icoUncoupledKinematicParcelFoam.
I was wondering if it would be possible to simulate a similar case with some small stainless steel balls?
I have no experience in this field so I am not sure what I should modified to be able to run such simulation.

I manage to run a case. But it's not exactly doing what I want.

I saw that in hopperInitialState, the balls are initially placed according to a file named "kinematicCloudPosition". My problem is how can I generate this file automatically ? Because so far, I used the file from the tutorial which is done for balls of 6mm while in my case they are only 2mm.

My second problem is with the visualisation. I use glyphs in Paraview in order to visualise my cloud. The problem is that if I put the correct size for my balls (1mm radius) it looks like the balls are not touching each other. I have to use a size of 3cm for the radius which is not realistic. What do you think?

A quick and dirty solution that I've used for stuff like this is create a script in matlab. It'd be easy enough through nested for- loops, incrementing your x, y and z coordinates as needed based on the extent of the domain. Adapt something like this, only for vectors:

http://www.dreamincode.net/forums/to...hristmas-tree/

Maybe store these vectors in an array and then output them in a file with the parentheses and newlines. You'll need to add an openfoam header as well. You could probably also write this IN c++ with openFoam, which may take a little longer but might be a worthwhile excercise depending on what you'd like to do in the future.