DEM Simulations of simple shear: Understanding flow behavior in simple systems
 |
 |
 |
DEM Simulation of a screw feeder: SERC’s HPC systems help un in probing flows in more complicated systems.
Main text in story page: Prof. Prabhu Nott’s Lab at Department of Chemical Engineering (CE) researches properties of granular materials. “The flow of granular materials, such as food grains, pharmaceutical powders, mineral ores and construction materials, are of immense importance to industry, but a fundamental understanding of the process is lacking. To build such an understanding, we utilize particle dynamics simulations, which have helped us validate mathematical models, and understand flow in devices such as screw feeders that are widely used in the industry”, says Prof. Nott. The group implements their simulations using LAMMPS, which is parallelized with MPI library and run with typical core counts ranging from 240 to 1600. Some of Prof. Nott’s work is Industry-academia collaboration, such as a project funded by Unilever that made use of SahasraT in 2019. Adds Prof. Nott, “these runs take a few hours on an HPC system like SahasraT, whereas on a lab workstation, they may take a few days or are simply unviable”.
Publications:
Dsouza, P., & Nott, P. (2020). A non-local constitutive model for slow granular flow that incorporates dilatancy. Journal of Fluid Mechanics, 888, R3. doi:10.1017/jfm.2020.62.