Local Verlet buffer approach for broad-phase interaction detection in Discrete Element Method

E-print/Working paper (2022)

The Extended Discrete Element Method (XDEM) is an innovative numerical simulation technique that extends the dynamics of granular materials known as Discrete Element Method (DEM) by additional properties ... [more ▼]

The Extended Discrete Element Method (XDEM) is an innovative numerical simulation technique that extends the dynamics of granular materials known as Discrete Element Method (DEM) by additional properties such as the thermodynamic state, stress/strain for each particle. Such DEM simulations used by industries to set up their experimental processes are complexes and heavy in computation time. At each time step, those simulations generate a list of interacting particles and this phase is one of the most computationally expensive parts of a DEM simulation. The Verlet buffer method, initially introduced in Molecular Dynamic (MD) (and also used in DEM), allows keeping the interaction list for many time steps by extending each particle neighbourhood by a certain extension range, and thus broadening the interaction list. The method relies on the temporal coherency of DEM, which guarantees that no particles move erratically from one time step to the next. In the classical approach, all the particles have their neighbourhood extended by the same value which leads to suboptimal performances in simulations where different flow regimes coexist. Additionally, and unlike in MD, there is no comprehensive study analysing the different parameters that affect the performance of the Verlet buffer method in DEM. In this work, we propose a new method for the dynamic update of the neighbour list that depends on the particles individual displacement and define a particle-specific extension range based on the local flow regime. The interaction list is analysed throughout the simulation based on the particle's displacement allowing a flexible update according to the flow regime conditions. We evaluate the influence of the Verlet extension range on the execution time through different test cases and analyse empirically the extension range value giving the best performance. [less ▲]

Analysis of a blast furnace behaviour through a resolving euler-lagrange approach

Scientific Conference (2021, October)

Eulerian-Lagrangian momentum coupling between XDEM and OpenFOAM using preCICE

in 14th WCCM & ECCOMAS Congress 2020 (2021, January)

Eulerian-Lagrangian couplings consider problems with a discrete phase as a particulate material that is in contact with a fluid phase. These applications are as diverse as engineering, additive ... [more ▼]

Eulerian-Lagrangian couplings consider problems with a discrete phase as a particulate material that is in contact with a fluid phase. These applications are as diverse as engineering, additive manufacturing, biomass conversion, thermal processing or pharmaceutical industry, among many others. A typical approach for this type of simulations is the coupling between Computation Fluid Dynamics (CFD) and Discrete Element Method (DEM), which is challenging in many ways. Such CFD--DEM couplings are usually implemented using an ad-hoc coupling layer, specific to the both DEM and CFD software, which considerably reduces the flexibility and applicability of the proposed implementation. In this work, we present the coupling of eXtended Discrete Element Method (XDEM), with the CFD library OpenFOAM, using the preCICE coupling library~\cite{preCICE} on volumetric meshes. Such momentum coupling requires the CFD side to account for the change of porosity due to the particulate phase and the particle momentum, while the particles of the DEM will be affected by the buoyancy and drag force of the fluid. While preCICE significantly simplifies the coupling between standalone libraries, each solver and, its respective adapter, have to be made aware of the new data involved in the physic model. For that, a new adapter has been implemented for XDEM and the existing adapter for OpenFOAM has been extended to include the additional data field exchange required for the momentum coupling, e.g porosity, particle momentum, fluid velocity and density. Our solution is tested and validated using simple benchmarks and advanced testcases such as a dam break, and shows consistent results. [less ▲]

Process analysis in thermal process engineering with high-performance computing using the example of grate firing

in Scherer, Viktor; Fricker, Neil; Reis, Albino (Eds.) Proceedings of the 12th European Conference on Industrial Furnaces and Boilers (2020, November)

Biomass as a renewable energy source continues to grow in popularity to reduce fossil fuel consumption for environmental and economic benefits. In the present contribution, the combustion chamber of a 16 ... [more ▼]

Biomass as a renewable energy source continues to grow in popularity to reduce fossil fuel consumption for environmental and economic benefits. In the present contribution, the combustion chamber of a 16 MW geothermal steam super-heater, which is part of the Enel Green Power "Cornia 2" power plant, is being investigated with high-performance computing methods. For this purpose, the extended discrete element method (XDEM) developed at the University of Luxembourg is used in a high-performance computing environment, which includes both the moving wooden bed and the combustion chamber above it. The XDEM simulation platform is based on a hybrid four-way coupling between the Discrete Element Method (DEM) and Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD). In this approach, particles are treated as discrete elements that are coupled by heat, mass, and momentum transfer to the surrounding gas as a continuous phase. For individual wood particles, besides the equations of motion, the differential conservation equations for mass, heat, and momentum are solved, which describe the thermodynamic state during thermal conversion. The consistency of the numerical results with the actual system performance is discussed in this paper to determine the potentials and limitations of the approach. [less ▲]

Numerical Analysis of Interaction between a Reacting Fluid and a Moving Bed with Spatially and Temporally Fluctuating Porosity

Scientific Conference (2020, August 31)

The purpose of this study is to propose a numerical approach that combines low computational costs through the use of high computing efficiency, allowing the realistic use of the design with a sufficient ... [more ▼]

The purpose of this study is to propose a numerical approach that combines low computational costs through the use of high computing efficiency, allowing the realistic use of the design with a sufficient result's accuracy for industrial applications to investigate biomass combustion in a large-scale reciprocating grate. In the present contribution, a Biomass combustion chamber of a 16 MW geothermal steam super-heater, which is part of the Enel Green Power "Cornia 2" power plant,is being investigated with high-performance computing methods. For this purpose, the extended discrete element method (XDEM) developed at the University of Luxembourg is used in an HPC environment, which includes both the moving wooden bed and the combustion chamber above it. The XDEM simulation platform is based on a hybrid four-way coupling between the Discrete Element Method (DEM) and Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD). In this approach, particles are treated as discrete elements that are coupled by heat, mass, and momentum transfer to the surrounding gas as a continuous phase. For individual wood particles, besides the equations of motion, the differential conservation equations for mass, heat, and momentum are solved, which describe the thermodynamic state during thermal conversion. The grate system has three different moving sections to ensure good mixing of the biomass parts and appropriate residence time. The primary air enters from below the grate and is split into four different zones. Furthermore, a secondary air is injected at high velocity straight over the fuel bed through nozzles. A Flue Gas Recirculation is present and partly injected through two jets along the vertical channel and partly from below the grate. The numerical 3D model presented is based on a multi-phase approach. The biomass particles are taken into consideration via the XDEM Method, while the gaseous phase is described by CFD with OpenFOAM. Thus, the combustion of the particles on the moving beds in the furnace is processed by XDEM through conduction, radiation and conversion along with the interaction with the surrounding gas phase accounted for by CFD. The coupling of CFD-XDEM as an Euler-Lagrange model is used. The fluid phase is a continuous phase handled with an Eulerian approach and each particle is tracked with a Lagrangian approach. Energy, mass and momentum conservation is applied for every single particle and the interaction of particles with each other in the bed and with the surrounding gas phase are taken into account. An individual particle can have a solid, liquid, gas or inert material phases (immobile species) at the same time. The different phases can undergo a series of conversion through various reactions that can be homogeneous, heterogeneous or intrinsic (drying, pyrolysis, gasification and oxidation). Our first results are consistent with actual data obtained from the sampling of the residual solid in the industrial plant. Our model is also able to predict gas flux behaviour inside the furnace, particularly the flue gas recirculation on the combustion process injection. [less ▲]

Parallel coupling strategy for multi-physics applications in eXtended Discrete Element Method

Scientific Conference (2020, June 18)

Multi-physics problems containing discrete particles interacting with fluid phases are widely used industry for example in biomass combustion on a moving grate, particle sedimentation, iron production ... [more ▼]

Multi-physics problems containing discrete particles interacting with fluid phases are widely used industry for example in biomass combustion on a moving grate, particle sedimentation, iron production within a blast furnace, and selective laser melting for additive manufacturing. The eXtended Discrete Element Method (XDEM) uses a coupled Eulerian-Lagrangian approach to simulate these complex phenomena, and relies on the Discrete Element Method (DEM) to model the particle phase and Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) for the fluid phases, solved respectively with XDEM and OpenFOAM. However, such simulations are very computationally intensive. Additionally, because the DEM particles move within the CFD phases, a 3D volume coupling is required, hence it represents an important amount of data to be exchanged. This volume of communication can have a considerable impact on the performance of the parallel execution. To address this issue, XDEM has proposed a coupling strategy relying on a co-located partitioning. This approach coordinates the domain decomposition of the two independent solvers, XDEM and OpenFOAM, to impose some co-location constraints and reduce the overhead due to the coupling data exchange. This strategy for the parallel coupling of CFD-DEM has been evaluated to perform large scale simulations of debris within a dam break flow. [less ▲]

Detailed Numerical Three-dimensional and Transient Analysis of a Grate Firing Combustion Process by Innovative High Performance Computing

Scientific Conference (2020, April 27)

Verlet buffer for broad-phase interaction detection in Discrete Element Method

Scientific Conference (2019, July 26)

The Extended Discrete Element Method (XDEM) is a novel and innovative numerical simulation technique that extends the dynamics of granular materials or particles as described through the classical ... [more ▼]

The Extended Discrete Element Method (XDEM) is a novel and innovative numerical simulation technique that extends the dynamics of granular materials or particles as described through the classical discrete element method (DEM) by additional properties such as the thermodynamic state, stress/strain for each particle. Such DEM simulations used by industries to set up their experimental processes are complex and heavy in computation time. Those simulations perform at each time step a collision detection to generate a list of interacting particles that is one of the most expensive computation parts of a DEM simulation. The Verlet buffer method, which was first introduced in Molecular Dynamic (MD) (and is also used in DEM) allows to keep the interaction list for many time step by extending each particle neighborhood by a certain extension range, and thus broadening the interaction list. The method relies mainly on the stability of the DEM, which ensures that no particles move erratically or unpredictably from one time step to the next: this is called temporal coherency. In the classical and current approach, all the particles have their neighborhood extended by the same value which leads to suboptimal performances in simulations where different flow regimes coexist. Additionally, and unlike in MD (which remains very different from DEM on several aspects), there is no comprehensive study analyzing the different parameters that affect the performance of the Verlet buffer method in DEM. In this work, we apply a dynamic neighbor list update method that depends on the particle's individual displacement, and an extension range specific to each particle and based on their local flow regime for the generation of the neighbor list. The update of the interaction list is analyzed throughout the simulation based on the displacement of the particle allowing a flexible update according to the flow regime conditions. We evaluate the influence of the Verlet extension range on the performance of the execution time through different test cases and we empirically analyze and define the extension range value giving the minimum of the global simulation time. [less ▲]

Co-located Partitioning Strategy and Dual-grid Multiscale Approach for Parallel Coupling of CFD-DEM Simulations

Scientific Conference (2019, June 05)

Verlet buffer for broad phase interaction detection in Discrete Element Method

Poster (2018, September 24)

The Extended Discrete Element Method (XDEM) is a novel and innovative numerical simulation technique that extends the dynamics of granular materials or particles as described through the classical ... [more ▼]

The Extended Discrete Element Method (XDEM) is a novel and innovative numerical simulation technique that extends the dynamics of granular materials or particles as described through the classical discrete element method (DEM) by additional properties such as the thermodynamic state, stress/strain for each particle. Such DEM simulations used by industries to set up their experimental processes are complexes and heavy in computation time. Therefore, simulations have to be precise, efficient and fast in order to be able to process hundreds of millions of particles. To tackle this issue, such DEM simulations are usually parallelized with MPI. One of the most expensive computation parts of a DEM simulation is the collision detection of particles. It is classically divided into two steps: the broad phase and the narrow phase. The broad phase uses simplified bounding volumes to perform an approximated but fast collision detection. It returns a list of particle pairs that could interact. The narrow phase is applied to the result of the broad phase and returns the exact list of colliding particles. The goal of this research is to apply a Verlet buffer method to (X)DEM simulations regardless of which broad phase algorithm is used. We rely on the fact that such DEM simulations are temporal coherent: the neighborhood only changes slightly from the last time-step to the current time-step. We use the Verlet buffer method to extend the list of pairs returned by the broad phase by stretching the particles bounding volume with an extension range. This allows re-using the result of the broad phase for several time-steps before an update is required once again and thereby its reduce the number of times the broad phase is executed. We have implemented a condition based on particles displacements to ensure the validity of the broad phase: a new one is executed to update the list of colliding particles only when necessary. This guarantees identical results because approximations introduced in the broad phase by our approach are corrected in the narrow phase which is executed at every time-steps anyway. We perform an extensive study to evaluate the influence of the Verlet extension range on the performance of the execution in terms of computation time and memory consumption. We consider different test-cases, partitioners (ORB, Zoltan, METIS, SCOTCH, ...), broad phase algorithms (Link cell, Sweep and prune, ...) and grid configurations (fine, coarse), sequential and parallel (up to 280 cores). While a larger Verlet buffer increases the cost of the broad phase and narrow phase, it also allows skipping a significant number of broad phase execution (> 99 \%). As a consequence, our first results show that this approach can speeds up the total .execution time up to a factor of 5 for sequential executions, and up to a factor of 3 parallel executions on 280 cores while maintaining a reasonable memory consumption. [less ▲]