Body fitted link-cell algorithm for particulate flow simulation in curved pipeline domain

The link-cell (LC) algorithm is widely used in discrete element method (DEM) simulation, in order to increase computational efficiency. The common way is to divide the entire computational domain into a series of square sub-cells. A huge index matrix, Omega, is required to store the information of particles located in each of these sub-cells. However, most of these sub-cells are always empty for some anomalistic computational domain, such as particulate flow in a pipeline. These empty sub-cells also consume the limited memory bandwidth and lower the computational power. In order to reduce the size of the index matrix, a body fitted link-cell (BFLC) algorithm is established to identify the neighbors quickly. Furthermore, a simplified algorithm for simulation of two dimensional particulate flow in curved pipelines is presented. Lastly, an example is presented to Validate the BFLC algorithm. (C) 2012 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.