An extension of the hard-sphere particle-particle collision model to study agglomeration

When performing Eulerian-Lagrangian simulations of particle-fluid flows collisions between the particles need to be accounted for. One of the methods used for this is the hard-sphere model. This model, however, does not take into account cohesive forces between the particles, and for this reason it is not able to simulate many aspects of real flows, such as the formation of agglomerates. There have been some attempts in literature to treat cohesive forces in simulations of particulate flows but none of these methods were actually implemented directly into the hard-sphere model but rather have been solved separately as a part of the numerical scheme. In this paper we show how the standard hard-sphere model may be extended to include these important interactions in an efficient and proper way. The extended model is presented in detail and some numerical results are shown. (C) 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.