XFEM coupling of granular flows interacting with surrounding fluids

In this paper, ideas for the simulation of sliding dry granular materials interacting with surrounding fluids are presented and first results are presented. The compressible granular material is modeled as a medium which can show solid-like and fluid-like characteristics. Therefore a weighted decomposition of stress tensors of a solid-like and a fluid-like phase is applied. The surrounding incompressible fluids are described with a Newtonian constitutive model. Interface dynamics are handled with the level-set method. The model equations are discretized with the space-time finite element method. Discontinuous solution characteristics across interfaces are captured numerically by the extended finite element method (XFEM). For all discontinuities the space of ansatz functions is enriched with Heaviside functions.