Development of a large scale discrete element modeling for fine particle conveying

Large amount of powder is treated in industrial fields, e.g., for powder storage, transportation and mixing. In designing these devices or investigating the operational conditions, numerical simulation is a promising approach from the viewpoint of minimizing costs. The Discrete Element Method (DEM) (Cundall & Strack, 1979) is widely used in numerical analyses of powder processes. On the other hand, the numerical analysis by the DEM requires calculation cost in proportional to the number of particles; the cost will be much expensive when the number of particles becomes huge. Besides, there are memory consumption problem which is required for calculation space.