Digital Twin Technology In The Thermal Processing Industry Of Granular Material Based On The Extended Discrete Element Method (XDEM)

Granular material is ubiquitous in our day-to-day environment and is dealt with in a variety of industries such as mineral, pharmaceutical, chemical, agriculture, biochemical and food to name a few. Apart from the storage and transport of granular material, it requires often thermal treatment in conjunction with a chemical conversion. Already the dynamics of granular material are complex, and the thermal conversion of particulate material in contact with a fluid phase poses an additional level of complexity. Being aware of the fundamental mechanisms and the interactions is a key factor for producing the optimal process and product. An understanding is effectively accomplished via research on a particle scale for which the Extended Discrete Element Method (XDEM) is a perfectly suited simulation platform. It evaluates the dynamic and thermodynamic state of individual particles of granular matter being processed. Each particle exchanges momentum, mass and heat with the surrounding fluid for which the state is predicted with Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD). In order to achieve utmost flexibility, particles are assigned specific material properties and a variety of processes may be attached to a particle covering heat-up, arbitrary chemical reactions or reaction mechanisms and phase changes e.g. drying coating or melting. Innovative and fast algorithms that are enhanced with a hybrid parallelisation strategy based on OpenMP and MPI reach industrial scales. Thus, applications are feasible on medium-sized workstations but also on highperformance computers within reasonable computational times.