[pibil1]

Greetings OpenFOAM community,

I want to simulate the experiments of a fluidized particles column collapsing. These particles were fluidized through a gas pump and initially confined by a wall. Suddenly, the wall is removed and the particles start to flow.

What would be an ad hoc solver to use? the main problem would be sudden wall or mesh movement, does anybody have any clues on how to do this?.

Attached is a sketch of the experimental setup.

Thank you so much for any help provided,
Best regards

[francescomarra]

Dear Pibil1,

it looks to me that your case falls mostly toward the granular than the particle laden flow regime. If the number of particles is not too high, I would suggest the implementation for granular flows provided by CFDEM (www.cfdem.com) that allows coupling of Openfoam with an efficient, soft sphere approach, solver called LIGGGHTS.

Regards,

Franco

[pibil1]

Thank you @francescomarra
for you kind help. Do you have any clue on how to implement the opening wall problem?.

Thanks a lot

[hulli]

Hi ,

as mentioned allready try the cdfem code. As far I remember you can define walls in the discrete element (DEM ) part which is the Ligggths component of cfdem coupling by which you can remove and insert your particles into your deomain. Very very generally spoken the secound component (FVM -> OpenFoam) is then used to simulate the behavior of your particles affected by the fluid... There are some tutorial that come with the open source package of CFDEM coupling may be you try the fluidized bed reactor in a first place... I hope that helps... Best H

[pibil1]

Thank you @francescomarra,

What if the particle concentration is very high? (diameter=0,05 mm) would LIGGGHTS be a suitable option?


Kind regards

Originally Posted by francescomarra

Dear Pibil1,

it looks to me that your case falls mostly toward the granular than the particle laden flow regime. If the number of particles is not too high, I would suggest the implementation for granular flows provided by CFDEM (www.cfdem.com) that allows coupling of Openfoam with an efficient, soft sphere approach, solver called LIGGGHTS.

Regards,

Franco

[francescomarra]

Dear Pibil,

sorry for the late answer. The LIGGGHTS part of CFDEM is built on a granular library that can perfectly deal with high particle concentration. It is based on a soft-sphere approach, that follows the deformation of each particle during the interaction with the others. It means that you need to simulate every particle in the domain, so it is not suitable for a huge number of particles.
I think, but I never tried something like this, that you can start the simulation with the wall than, at a certain moment during fluidization, stop the simulation, delete the internal wall, and restart the simulation to see the particles flow down.

Best regards,
Franco

[pibil1]

Very nice idea Franco, thanks for all your help.

Kind regards