HEAT AND MASS TRANSFER BETWEEN XDEM & OPENFOAM USING PRECICE COUPLING LIBRARY

This work demonstrates the rapid development of a simulation environment to achieve
Heat and Mass Transfer (HMT) between Discrete Element Methods (DEM) and Computa-
tional Fluid Dynamics (CFD). The HMT coupling can be employed to simulate processes
such as drying, pyrolysis, combustion, melting, solid-fluid reactions etc and have indus-
trial applications such as biomass furnaces, boilers, heat exchangers, and flow through
packed beds. This shows that diverse CFD features and solvers need to be coupled with
DEM in order to achieve various applications mentioned above.
The proposed DEM-CFD Eulerian-Lagrangian coupling for heat and mass transfer is
achieved by employing the preCICE coupling library[1] on volumetric meshes. In our
prototype, we use the eXtended Discrete Element Method (XDEM)[2] for handling DEM
calculations and OpenFOAM for the CFD. The XDEM solver receives various CFD data
fields such as fluid properties, and flow conditions exchanged through preCICE, which
are used to set boundary conditions for particles. Various heat transfer and mass transfer
laws have been implemented in XDEM to steer HMT source term computations. The heat
and mass source terms computed by XDEM are transferred to CFD solver and added as
source. These source terms represent particles in CFD.
The generic coupling interface of preCICE, XDEM and its adapter allows to tackle a di-
verse range of applications. We demonstrate the heat, mass & momentum coupling capa-
bilities through various test cases and then compared with our legacy XDEM-OpenFOAM
coupling and experimental results.