Numerical simulations of liquid-solid flows with free surface by coupling IMPS and DEM

Liquid-solid two-phase flow with free surface is a significant issue in nature and engineering fields. In present study, an in-house solver MPSDEM-SJTU based on a fully Lagrangian coupled method is developed to solve the problems of liquid-solid two-phase flows. The improved moving particle semi-implicit (IMPS) method is applied for the simulation of incompressible viscous liquid flows while the discrete element method (DEM) is used to model the interaction among the solid particles. The coupling strategy is based on the local averaging technique. Multiple time-step algorithm is adopted for those two methods to balance the stability and the efficiency. The free surface detection and the solid-fluid neighbor search are modified. A simulation of multi-balls collapse is conducted to verify the DEM program of the present solver. The distributions of solid balls at different instants are in good agreement with the experimental results. Then, this solver is applied for two typical problems of twophase flows, including the two-phase dam-break and the liquid-solid flows in a rotating cylindrical tank. The flow front, flow patterns and the shape of solid beds all agree well with experimental observations.

Automated summary

A self-developed solver based on a fully Lagrangian coupled method was developed to solve liquid-solid two-phase flow problems, using the IMPS and DEM method with a multiple time-step algorithm to maintain stability and efficiency.