6-way coupling of DEM+CFD+FEM with preCICE

In this work, we present our preliminary results on the 6-way coupling of 3 numerical solvers: XDEM for the Discrete Element Method (DEM), OpenFOAM for Computation Fluid Dynamics (CFD), and deal.II for Finite Element Method (FEM). We relied on the existing preCICE adapters for OpenFOAM and deal.II and we have implemented a new preCICE adapter for the eXtended Discrete Element Method (XDEM), an innovative DEM software developed at the University of Luxembourg. The XDEM adapter permits coupling of the particulate phase of DEM with CFD and FEM:
- DEM+FEM is a surface coupling that performs the exchange of surface forces and displacement between the particles and a deformable solid;
- DEM+CFD is a volume coupling that performs the exchange of porosity, momentum, drag force and buoyancy between the particles and the fluid.
Put together with the pre-existing CFD+FEM coupling, we obtain a 6-way coupled multi-physics solver for particles, fluid and deformable solids. We have tested and evaluated our multi-physics solver on the tutorial case “Cylinder with a flap” derived from the benchmarking case of Turek and Hron, that we extended to include a particulate phase solved by XDEM.